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yamayuandadu · 5 months

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Tamamizu Monogatari, a unique love story

This article, unlike most of my recent longer pieces, was not planned in advance. I learned about the subject very recently, and instantly realized I absolutely have to introduce it to more people, the previously posted schedule be damned. The Tale of Tamamizu (玉水物語, Tamamizu Monogatari) is a story about a fox turning into a human, but a rather unconventional one, filled with an unusual degree of sympathy for the eponymous protagonist and focused on a rather unique relationship. In addition to summarizing it in detail and explaining the possible inspirations behind it, I will also try to explain why the tale found a new life on social media as a, broadly speaking, lgbt narrative, and why I think there is a compelling case to be made for such an interpretation. Unless stated otherwise, all images used through the article are taken from the Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive, on whose website you can view scans of the original Tamamizu Monogatari.

The Tale of Tamamizu, also known as The Contest of Autumn Leaves (Momiji Awase) is an example of otogi-zōshi, illustrated prose narrative. The story was presumably originally composed in the Muromachi period (1335-1573), and it survives in multiple copies dated either to the early Edo period or to the end of the Japanese “middle ages” directly preceding it. The identity of the author (or authors) is unknown. Despite its apparent popularity in the past, it seems no major studies of the tale of Tamamizu have ever been conducted. A streamlined translation (or rather an extensive summary) was published online by Kyoto University Library in 2001 and can be accessed here. In 2018, a full translation, as well as a brief introduction, were prepared for the anthology Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales. Still, it doesn't seem either sparked all that much interest in Tamamizu, despite the story’s obvious modern appeal. Since the tale of Tamamizu is not well known, I will start with a detailed summary. I am consistently using female pronouns for Tamamizu after she transforms, as does the older translation. The other English translation switches between female and male pronouns. I will explain in the final paragraph of the article why I made the decision to follow the former. The Tale of Tamamizu The story of Tamamizu does not start with the eponymous character, but rather with a certain mr. Takayanagi from Toba. He is troubled, as while he is already 30, he has no children. He decides the only choice is to pray to gods and buddhas. This actually does work, and his wife becomes pregnant, and after the expected period gives birth to a daughter. She doesn’t get a name at any point in the story. The girl’s birth is followed by a timeskip. As we learn, she was distinguished by twenty five features associated with beauty. This is apparently a reference to the belief that a buddha possessed thirty two specific physical traits; the number might have been altered to twenty five because of a popular group of twenty five bodhisattvas associated with Amida. By the time she reached the age of fifteen or so, she also developed great skill in composing poetry in both Japanese and Chinese. Her parents at some point decided that it would be ideal to send her to serve in the emperor’s court in the future. The girl spends most of the time in awe of the blooming of flowers, the wind and other similar phenomena, as one would expect from a literary character of similar status. She maintains her own flower garden, and spends much of her time there.

On one of the days when she visited it alongside her friend Tsukisae, the daughter of her nurse, she caught the attention of a fox. The fox is, at this point in time, not yet Tamamizu. He wishes he could introduce himself to the girl. He considers the standard method - transforming into a nobleman - but he realizes this would likely sadden the girl’s parents, and would tarnish her reputation. He falls into despair. It does not exactly help that his attempts at visiting the garden again end up poorly - on the way there, he gets pelted with stones and then, after trying again, shot with an arrow. Still, he continued to hope to meet with the girl. An opportunity finally arose through a lucky coincidence. Another family living in the same area had multiple sons, but no daughters, much to the parents chagrin. They loudly lamented that they wished they had at least one girl among the children. The fox overheard that and realized it might be an opportunity. He transformed himself into a teenage girl (curiously, the story specifically puts her at the exact same age as the unnamed second protagonist), and enters their house. She explains that she is an orphan, and while passing by she overheard the family’s woes. She offers to become their daughter. The couple instantly agrees.

The fox spends some time living with her adoptive family, though she gets sad easily and keeps bursting into tears. After some time, they offer that they will find her a husband in due time, but she reacts to that poorly, and eventually suggests she would prefer to become the servant of a noble lady. Her adoptive mother agrees this isn’t a bad idea, and reveals that her younger sister is a lady-in-waiting of the daughter of a local noble, mr. Takayanagi. She suggests the fox could become her attendant too. She is overjoyed at this prospect, and is soon sent to Takayanagi’s mansion to meet with his daughter. The girl receives her new attendant warmly, and gives her a nickname, Tamamizu-no-mae (Tamamizu for short). They get along really well, and Tamamizu gets to partake in her various activities, serves her food and drinks, and even sleeps in the same bed (Tsukisae does too, though). While Tamamizu does remarkably well as a human, some of her fox habits remain. Most notably, she is really afraid of dogs. Her lady sympathizes with her plight, and actually bans dogs from her household. This is a much welcome change from Tamamizu’s point of view, though apparently some other members of the staff start to view her as a coward because of this, and simultaneously resent her closeness with the girl. The bond between Tamamizu and the girl reaches a new level when on a moonlight night they spontaneously compose a poem together. It deals with longing. We are told it was followed up by multiple other poems, which are not quoted in the story. Eventually the girl gets tired and heads to her room. However, Tamamizu remains outside gazing at the moon and eventually starts crying, unsure what fate awaits her. Tsukisae, who was inside all along, actually becomes concerned about Tamamizu, and says she feels sorry for her, correctly identifying the cause of her sorrow as love for an unidentified party. She shares her thoughts with their lady (in the form of a poem, of course). The latter summons Tamamizu inside, and soon all three go to bed together. Tamamizu is still overwhelmed by her feelings and can’t fall asleep, though. Tamamizu continues to serve the girl for the next three years. She also remains in touch with her adoptive mother, who sends her letters and new clothes every now and then. One day, many visitors arrived in the house for a friendly competition. The winner will be the person with the most beautiful collection of autumn leaves. Tamamizu decides she must find some for her mistress to give her an advantage. To accomplish that, at night for the first time in years she turns back into a fox, and leaves to visit her siblings. Not the adoptive ones, though. As it turns out, she has two fox brothers, one younger and one older. She actually hasn’t visited them in so long they assumed she died and held funerary services for her in the meanwhile. They are overjoyed to learn that is not the case, and after learning about her current life agree to help her with finding unique leaves. She tells them to leave them on the veranda of her mistress’ mansion, and reassures them it’s safe for foxes to be there thanks to the earlier decision to not allow dogs on the premises. After the visit Tamamizu returns home in her human form. Tsukisae and her mistress ask her where she has been, and she jokes about meeting with a “dubious fellow” (which, to be fair, is not even a lie, given the typical folkloric portrayal of foxes). This in turn leads to more jokes, revolving around Tamamizu no longer thinking about her mistress. She feels distressed by this suggestion.

Tamamizu’s brothers in the meanwhile succeed in their search for thrilling leaves. One of them found a branch with five-colored leaves decorated with the Lotus Sutra (as you probably know, one of the main religious texts in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition). Tamamizu is overjoyed, and instantly brings them to her mistress. The girl received plenty of leaves from other people in the meanwhile, but all of them pale in comparison. She is so happy about the gift that she requests Tamamizu to also write poems meant to accompany the presentation of the collection. She protests that she is unsuitable, but eventually accepts this honor and gets down to work. The parents of the girl came along to watch her write, and both of them concluded she is exceptionally skilled. She ends up providing five poems, one for each color of leaves gathered. They are subsequently combined by these the girl wrote herself.

Obviously, the main characters’ joint entry wins the competition. This grants the girl such fame that the emperor declares she should come to his court. Since her father is not affluent enough to pay for traveling there, he bestows additional estates upon him to make that possible. Even Tamamizu gets her own estate, Kakuta in Settsu Province. However, she decides it will be for the best to give it to her adoptive parents. Shortly after that, Tamamizu’s adoptive mother falls sick. She leaves her mistress to attend to her, but it did not help much and her condition kept worsening. Therefore, her stay had to be extended over and over again. This predicament worries her mistress, who sends her a letter to let her know that it is boring and gloomy without her around, and implores her to return as soon as her mother’s condition improves. Tsukisae is similarly concerned. Both of them voice their concerns through poems, which at this point should not be surprising for the reader.

Tamamizu of course appreciates these displays of sympathy, but she cannot return, so in response she only reassures both of them that she will meet with them again as soon as possible. Shortly after that, the mother’s condition worsened yet again. The entire family laments through the entire day, but eventually everyone manages to fall asleep - save for Tamamizu. In the middle of the night Tamamizu notices that an old, hairless fox entered the house. She quickly realizes that he was her paternal uncle (a fox uncle, that is. Not a relative of her adoptive parents). The illness was his doing, as she quickly realizes. Tamamizu requests him to leave her adoptive mother alone. However, the old fox says he cannot do that, as the illness is his act of revenge against her family, since her father killed his child. He concluded it is only right to make his daughter sick so that she dies too.

Tamamizu admits that this makes sense in theory, but she points out that acting upon desire for revenge will only bring bad karma, and bad karma from previous lives is why both of them were born as foxes in the first place. She offers the old fox a crash course in Buddhist ethics, and warns him that accumulating even more bad karma might lead to someone eventually killing him too, and to yet more rebirths in one of the three realms which are best to avoid (animals, hungry spirits, hell).

The old fox notes following buddhas is for humans, not for those born in other realms of rebirth (he’s not entirely wrong, humans are generally held to be in the optimal condition to seek enlightenment; animals must follow instinct and thus end up accumulating bad karma, devas are to preoccupied with celestial bliss), but eventually he relents and agrees that it would be wrong to kill the woman because of the actions of her father. He concludes that it would not even make him feel better, since his child would remain dead. He tells Tamamizu that evidently he was able to meet her because of good karma acquired in a past life, asks her to pray for his deceased child, and leaves, announcing he shall become a monk reciting nenbutsu from now on. Tamamizu did what he asked for, and even performed a funerary service for her late cousin. With the problem solved, her adoptive mother returned to good health. She was therefore free to meet with her mistress again. She was elevated to the rank of chujo no kimi, the foremost among servants. However, despite her mistress’ best efforts to make her feel appreciated, she was suffering from persistent bouts of melancholy. She wished she could confess her love and consummate the relationship, but she concluded that since she kept her identity secret for so long, it would be no longer possible to reveal it without losing the acceptance of the girl. She decides she must disappear. However, before that she prepares a long poem explaining her predicament.

She placed it in a box, and gave it to her mistress, explaining that it should only be opened if something happens to her. She then broke down in tears.

Tamamizu’s mistress does not fully understand what is happening, and asks if she perhaps is worried about their planned relocation to the imperial court. However, Tamamizu denies that and guarantees she will accompany her on the journey there. Her mistress starts crying too, and says she has hoped they will always be together. Shortly after, the day of the journey came. Tamamizu’s mistress and mr. Takayanagi, now recognized as a lord, were certain that she went with them, but as soon as they reached their destination it turned out she was nowhere to be found. Days upon days of grieving followed. Eventually, the girl realized that she had no choice but to open the box. From the poem contained within, she learned everything about Tamamizu, from the day they first met all the way up to the disappearance. It explained how she hoped to protect her mistress through her current life and beyond, but had to give up after realizing it was all in vain. In the final words of the poem, she firmly refers to her with the name she was given by the girl - Tamamizu.

The poem moves her deeply, but the story does not have a happy ending - we never learn what happened to Tamamizu afterwards.

Tamamizu’s forerunners

It is agreed that much like the considerably more famous Tamamo no Mae, Tamamizu in part depends on earlier Chinese literature about foxes. Not exactly on the same sort of stories, though - she is not exactly a malevolent seductress, to put it lightly. The key to finding her forerunners is the scene in the beginning when the still nameless fox considers transforming into a male suitor at first, before settling on the form of a female attendant, and the erudition she displays through the story. An argument can be made that this is conscious engagement with a very specific type of older fox story, largely forgotten today. In Tang China, fox stories enjoyed considerable popularity. You may remember that I mentioned this in passing a few months ago in another fox-themed article. One of the genres popular at the time was focused on fox suitors. There are many stories like that, but they largely follow a similar plot: a male fox falls in love with a human girl, takes the form of a dashing literatus and requests marriage. The girl’s family rejects the proposal, as despite charm and erudition the fox is ultimately an outsider with no family, and doesn’t depend on the well established institution of matchmaking. Afterwards, he typically tries to win the girl over with some sort of trick, and fails in the process, thus meeting his demise when his real identity is inevitably exposed.

In some cases, twists are introduced and the fox is effectively exploited by the family: for example, in the story about a certain mr. Hu (a common surname which is a homonym for the word for fox) and the granddaughter of the official Li Yuangong, the Li family agrees for the girl to be taught by the fox, and even asks him for advice on various matters, just to kill him once he outlived his usefulness.

Zhou Wenju's painting A Literary Garden (文苑图, Wenyuantu), showing a group of discouring Tang literati (wikimedia commons)

Many literati came from humble backgrounds, and only attained high positions thanks to success in the imperial examinations. However, their advances were often frowned upon by nobles, who saw them as upstarts. Therefore, faking a more notable origin was widespread to secure a better position in the high strata of society. All of this is reflected in the stories of the fox suitors. Xiaofei Kang, who wrote my favorite monograph about Chinese fox beliefs, notes that the stories might have effectively been a way to cope with everyday anxieties. In other words, perhaps the fox self insert fails so that the real person sharing his precarious status can succeed.

Another aspect of the Tale of Tamamizu which offers a clue about its origins is the focus on Buddhism, and its role in the lives of non-humans in particular. Tamamizu evidently attains a considerable familiarity with Buddhist doctrine, to the point the old fox basically seems to perceive her as thinking more like a human than a fox. Evidently, she doesn’t think being an animal should prevent one from seeking good karma. This seems to reflect a medieval Buddhist phenomenon. Roughly from the Insei period (1086-1185) up to the eighteenth century, and especially between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the dominant esoteric schools of Buddhism propagated the doctrine of hongaku (本覺), “original enlightenment”. This idea originates in an earlier Buddhis text, Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna. According to proponents of this idea all living beings, even plants, possessed an innate “Buddha nature”, as did natural features like mountains. They were innately capable of attaining enlightenment, or innately enlightened outright. Religion influences art, so it has been argued that the spread of new stories about animals behaving like people in the Muromachi period had a distinctly Buddhist dimension.

The modern reception of Tamamizu

Despite the fascinating themes of the story of Tamamizu, it only found a greater degree of modern recognition in 2019, outside of academic circles at that. I'm surprised it took so long, since when you think about it, the sensibilities of the author indeed seem surprisingly modern. The narrator even reassures us Tamamizu’s human form is the same age as the object of her affection, anticipating what sorts of shipping discourse could arise 700 years later. Anyway, in 2019 a fragment of the story was the subject of one of the classical Japanese literature questions from the National Center Test for University Admissions, a standardized university entrance exam held across Japan each January from 1990 to 2020. This obviously exposed an enormous number of people to it, not just exam-takers. Following this event, a Tamamizu fad seemingly swept social media and pixiv (curiously, there’s a single piece of art there which predates the phenomenon by six years; op actually updated the description in 2019 to say they are happy more people learned about the story). There’s even a Tamamizu Monogatari tag on Dynasty Scans as a result. It’s worth pointing out the wikipedia entry of the story was written in 2019 as well. Most curiously apparently a research project focused on Tamamizu, Kahoko Iguru’s Border transgression between species and gender as observed in “Tamamizu Monogatari”, received a grant in the same year too (source; more info here). It doesn’t seem the results have been published yet. I will keep you updated if that changes, obviously. I am actually surprised I didn’t notice the Tamamizu phenomenon back then, even though 2019 Antonia was distinctly more terminally online than 2023 Antonia is. It’s worth noting that Tamamizu’s fame didn’t fade away. The online following the story gained was referenced in an Asahi Shimbun article a year later. A quick survey of social media will show you there are people still talking about Tamamizu today. People who aren’t me, that is. What made Tamamizu so unexpectedly popular - arguably more than the story has been in the past few centuries - in recent years? Most of the linked sources relatively neutrally state that people perceive it as a “unique love story”. Social media posts are often considerably more direct: for many people, the appeal lies in the realization the Tale of Tamamizu is probably the closest to a lesbian love story in the entire corpus of medieval Japanese literature. I won’t deny this is in no small part its appeal for me too. Note this is not an universal sentiment by any means, though. It is difficult to tell if this was the intent of the medieval author(s), of course. It is obviously impossible to deny that women attracted to women existed in medieval Japan, as is the case in every society since the dawn of history. However, they left little, if any, trace in textual sources. As pointed out by Bernard Faure, in Japan in the past as in many other historical societies “sexuality without men is properly unthinkable” and therefore received no coverage. While there is plenty of Japanese Buddhist literature dealing with male homosexuality (trust me though, you do not want to read it; I’ve included a brief explanation why in the bibliography), there is basically nothing when it comes to women. The only possible exception is what some authors argue might be a medieval depiction of a lesbian couple in Tengu Zōshi, a work I plan to discuss in more detail next month, but note that this would be only an example of condemnation, since this work is a religious polemic dealing with vices of the clergy.

The supposed lesbian couple from Tengu Zōshi; image from Haruko Wakayabashi's The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism; reproduced here for educational purposes only.

This sort of absence of evidence is a recurring pattern through history - you might recall my own attempts to find out what Bronze Age Mesopotamian sources have to say on this matter. Before the Meiji period, when the term dōseiai (同性愛) was coined as a calque of Charles Gilbert Chaddok’s freshly invented label “homosexual”, there wasn’t even a distinct Japanese term which could be applied to lesbian relationships. Once again, this does not indicate this phenomenon did not exist - but it does indicate that due to extreme levels of sexism in the perception of both sexuality and relationships it was difficult to even imagine for the average author. Faure suggests the prevailing attitude was presumably similar as in continental Buddhism, in which lesbian love “was at best perceived as a poor imitation of heterosexual relations—or a preparation for them—and as such condemned” at least in monastic rules. To put it bluntly, only penetrative sex was regarded as real.

And yet, in spite of this, I do not think it is wrong to wonder if perhaps what seems like subtext to a modern reader is actually intentional. This is obviously a reach, but given that relationships between women - not even romantic ones - were historically not a major concern of most authors, I would argue it is not impossible that a work which revolves virtually entirely around the relationships between female characters was written by a woman. Perhaps a woman romantically interested in other women, even. Even more boldly, I’d ponder if perhaps the ambiguous gender of the fox before transformation was meant to make the romance palatable to general audiences. Note that while foxes transforming is a mainstay of both Japanese and Chinese literature, the change of gender is actually quite uncommon in such stories, making this single reference all the more unusual. Granted, gender change is hardly a major focus in the story of Tamamizu. The only real indication the fox is male is the decision to take a male human form at first, but beyond that, things get muddy to the point the matter of gender in the story evidently warranted an actual study, as I pointed out earlier. As you’ve noticed, this matter was approached in different ways by translators too. I personally think the most important factor is the fact Tamamizu refers to herself with this name in the final poem. This name is intimately tied to the distinctly female identity she took. Whoever she was in the beginning, by the end of the story she is clearly Tamamizu. If one felt particularly bold a case perhaps even be made that Tamamizu can be read as a trans woman based on this, perhaps. I think simply disregarding the brief reference to a male form is valid too, though. Even if these arguments were to be refuted fully, I would argue that there is a further reason why at the very least reinterpreting the story as dealing with a gay relationship is not against the spirit of the original work. As I outlined, the tale of Tamamizu seems to draw inspiration from a very specific genre of fox stories, in which foxes are essentially a metaphor for people seeking relationships which were frowned upon. Obviously, the fact that Tamamizu is not a human by default makes any relationship she would be involved in somewhat unusual and frowned upon, but that does not assign a different metaphorical meaning to her struggle. Is Tamamizu even really fully a fox and not a human at all by the time she writes the confession of her love, though? The old fox seems to basically dispute if she still thinks like an animal. We also know that she maintained her human form for so long her biological relatives assumed she had passed away. She also found acceptance of virtually every single human character in the story - save for herself, that is. It’s also not like it’s hard to reinterpret her struggle specifically with the inability to consummate the relationship through the lens of the medieval Buddhist views of female sexuality, rather than through the lens of the general view that relationships between human and transformed foxes were doomed to failure. To paraphrase Cynthia Eller’s evergreen quote about futile search for nonexistent matriarchal prehistory in ancient texts, I do not think an invented wlw past can give anyone a future, but at the same time I do not think it means we should conclude that nobody ever had similar experiences in the past, or that we can relate with works even in ways their authors did not intend. For this reason, I would ultimately argue in favor of embracing the Tale of Tamamizu as a narrative which can be read as a lesbian love story.

Bibliography

Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (please note: read this book very cautiously since multiple content warnings apply. Faure is a remarkably progressive author, so it’s not about his personal attitude or anything. The problem is that it is not possible to deny much of the Japanese Buddhist discourse about homosexuality had little to do with modern notion of gay relationships, and essentially amounts to explaining when exploitation of children is a pious act)

Rania Huntington, Alien Kind. Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (some sort of explicit content warning applies here too, though mostly because some of the discussed works are trashy Qing period erotica. More funny than anything.)

Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Keller Kimbrough and Haruo Shirane (eds.), Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales

Jacqueline Stone, Medieval Tendai hongaku thought and the new Kamakura Buddhism: A reconsideration

#japanese literature #tamamizu monogatari #lgbt history

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ootahime · 7 months

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The Yagasuri Panel's Meaning + Gojohime and Sprituality

Hello, everybody! I know I've been gone for the past two years but I'm finally back. With the release of the latest chapter I've been incredibly devastated but it still won't stop me from being delusional! Since there has been a lot of talk surrounding Gojo and Buddha, I've been doing some research, and I think I found something that potentially draws us closer to the meaning of the famous Yagasuri panel :)

CHAPTER 236 SPOILERS AHEAD

As a quick refresher, the pattern displayed in the background of Gojo and Utahime is a traditional Japanese pattern called yagasuri. According to the sources I found on the internet, the arrows are related to archery, and thus were a common pattern on male clothing. The design represents the unwavering nature of an arrow because once it is shot, it will never return. Brides in the Edo period wore the pattern as a symbol of good luck, ensuring that they will not have to return to their families. Additionally, in Buddhism, the arrows embody the fight against evil.

There are a few interesting things I'd like to point out about the information above. For one, from all the pictures I've seen, the arrows in the yagasuri pattern are typically pointed downward, whereas in the cover, they are pointed from Gojo toward Utahime. Two, the pattern's relation to Buddhism and Buddha. Since there are many parallels to Gojo and Buddha, I went on a quest to research more about the story of Buddha (Prince Siddhartha) out of my own curiosity. What's fascinating is that supposedly in his early life, he won his wife, Princess Yasodhara, in an archery contest. They were married at an early age and had a newborn son when Prince Siddhartha was 29. Unfortunately, he leaves his family behind to embark on a journey toward enlightenment.

Aren't these details crazy?

Buddha's wife was a princess. Utahime means song princess/diva/songstress.

Both couples share a connection with archery/arrows.

Gojo is currently 29 years old in the manga and is theorized to reach enlightenment soon (assuming he truly is following the path of Buddha).

BUT THERE IS MORE.

Apparently, Yasodhara has been Buddha's wife for many lifetimes. While there are numerous stories of the two's history in their past lives, the one I'd like to bring attention to is from The Collective Sutra of the Buddha's Past Acts. The text recounts the first time Prince Siddhartha comes into contact with Yasodhara in a previous life as a Brahmin (Hindu priest) by the name of Sumedha, while she was a woman named Sumidha. As he waits for Buddha Dipankara to arrive to the city of Paduma, Sumedha decides to buy flowers as an offering. He then discovers that the king bought all the flowers as his own offering to the Buddha, much to his dismay. But in the corner of his eye, he spots a beautiful young girl with 7 lotuses in her hands and offers to buy one from her. The girl, Sumidha, vows to give 5 of her lotuses to him in exchange for being his wife in all of their next lives. In another version, Sumedha and Sumidha went to a city where Buddha Dipankara was expected to visit. He then asks her for one of her flowers to throw as an offering to the Buddha. She then asks him to throw another one in her behalf. Buddha Dipankara summons the two and reveals that they will remain connected for many lifetimes and help each other attain enlightenment.

In the latest chapter, we see a panel of lotuses. From what is visible, there are 7 flowers. 7 flowers? 7. Flowers. I also think it's a funny coincidence how Sumidha promises to give Sumedha 5 flowers due to the fact that we associate Gojo with the number 5 because of the kanji in his name.

Just like Prince Siddhartha and Princess Yasodhara, I believe Gojo and Utahime are connected by fate. In the manga, whenever Utahime appears, it is almost always in relation to Gojo. They are made to contrast each other in almost everything besides motivations. Their color palettes, the schools they teach at, their values, and positioning in the jujutsu hierarchy. These are not coincidences.

And yet, despite all these differences, there seems to be a mutual level of trust between the two of them that transcends their usual bickering dynamic. Utahime has no obligation to help Gojo, but she does anyway. She CHOOSES to help him because she understands they share a common goal: protecting and nurturing the students. On Gojo's side, he CHOOSES to request a helping hand from Utahime first. Out of all people, he wanted to reveal his suspicions to her first. While Utahime provides assistance when she can, Gojo looks out for her when he can.

He claims that it is a pain to look out for the weak, but he continues to protect her. Gojo and Utahime put their lives at risk helping each other because they TRUST each other.

If my theory is true and it turns out that they are connected by fate, it would explain the unusual direction of the yagasuri in chapter 34. No matter how many lifetimes have passed, the soul of Gojo will always return to Utahime, just like how Sumedha promised Sumidha that he will marry her in every life. And the soul of Utahime will remain assisting him toward the journey of enlightenment.

I'm not saying they're married or anything but their relationship honestly parallels Prince Siddhartha and Princess Yasodhara so well. Although both of their narratives appear to culminate in the man's quest for enlightenment, they nonetheless serve as compelling illustrations of the power of a relationship founded on mutual trust.

___________

I might add on to this post later on if I feel like I missed something, but let me know what you think! :D These reaches are my specialty so be sure to take it with a grain of salt and don't take it too seriously. It's all in great fun :3

#gojo x utahime #gojohime #gouta

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yeyinde · 11 months

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I know this would be terribly inaccurate and morally wrong, but it's taking too much space up in my brain and I can't write NSFW to save my life and I'll stop rambling and get to the point about this random hoe ass dream I had the other night about Bear (Graves).

But that table in the middle of their storage area room thing (with the cages)? Imagine getting railed on that table. Horrible consequences if you're caught, but in the moment that doesn't matter.

I didn't even really clock the morally wrong portion of this until just now—I just immediately started writing it.

Warnings: MATURE | 18+ — pseudo exhibition kink, corruption (as in, MC does everything possible to break Bear), risk-seeking behaviour; light smut Word Count: 2,2k Notes: it's been so long since I wrote smut that I kinda forgot how. alsoooooooo. it's deffo early season 2 Bear. With the beard and the unhinged madness and tragic angst. Okay? Okay.

It's a whim.

One of those terrible ideas you sometimes get—like the insatiable curiosity to know what it would feel like to snuff out an open flame between your thumb and forefinger, or lick the anode and cathode of a 9V battery just for the thrill of it. The electric hum of recklessness that surges through your veins, pitched right between the accompanying high of a short-lived adrenaline rush. An addictive sense of danger that isn't really dangerous.

It isn't enough to kill you, or cause any severe injuries—no. You're not stupid. It's just one of those passing no good, bad, and very terrible ideas that leak from that place inside your head where madness and idiocy spool.

Sometimes, it doesn't even hurt.

(But you've always liked it better when it does.)

This, then, must be that.

This, of course, being:

Bear—so austere, so stalwart—bracing his thick fingers against the back of your neck, palm so wide it swallows you whole. Clipped nails pinching your skin when he digs in tight, holding on to you as he fucks you stupid, fucks you senseless against a metal table, perfectly perched in the middle of the room like an altar.

His nails cut a scratch on your hip when he pulls you back by the bone to meet his heavy, hurried thrusts, growling low in his throat at the madness of this all. The danger. The recklessness.

Eyes oscillating between the open doorway split into three possible entry points where anyone—Chase, Trevor, Buddha, Caulder—could walk in and see, catching Bear fucking you over a table; and you—

Bent over, fingers scratching at the linoleum beneath your hands, keening desperately for more.

It's more brutal than you'd expect him to be considering where you are, where he is, but there's a weight to the way he pounds into you, a palpable sense of urgency, and need. Rapacious, you think, and wonder if it's the tantalising aspect of exhibitionism, the fear of getting caught, that brims white-hot in the balmy air between you, or if it's the setting alone that threatens to undo him.

Fucking out in the open—with a man who yelped when you tried to ride him on the bed of his stupid pickup truck under the stars; vanilla incarnate, all American apple pie left to cool on an open windowsill in the heartland—is probably as close to true trouble as a man like him, the one bent over you now, has come before. You wonder if this is his Saddam. If he scents brimstone in the air when he curls over you, staining your skin with droplets of sweat that pools down from his brow, drips off his temples.

It was that same sweat that started it all.

Anger carved canyons into his forehead, ploughing five neat, little lines through tanned skin—flushed slightly pink near his hairline, and bleeding down across the bridge of his nose, the patch of skin between his lash line and beard, undoubtedly from standing on the sun-beaten shores of Virginia Beach all morning. The sweat that beaded across his skin was patchy, drying into patches of congealed salt above his brow, but dripping down his temples in rivulets of exertion, and cutting a clear path to his jaw, where it fell, pooling like a lagoon in the dips of his collarbones.

You wanted to lick it off.

An odd thought considering the arched reprimand he was in the middle of doling out. Sharp, slurred words of can't be here, and reckless, all undercut with an air of something balmy, something hot that simmers below the surface.

His eyes flashed, cool blue to cobalt, when you lifted your shoulder in a lazy, half-hearted shrug, shirt slipping down, exposing skin to his irritated gaze, and, oh. Oh.

The scorching heat you felt wafting off of him in puffs of humid air had little to do with temperature, with anger.

The words, then, took on a new meaning.

Can't be here, can't do this here. Reckless.

And so, you leaned up on the tips of your toes, and flicked your tongue across his skin, eyes lidded and heavy as the briny tang of sweat and seawater flooded your senses.

It was surprising that he let you. That after some more growling protests about shame, and public decency, he quieted fairly quickly when you slipped your hand into his trousers, letting the heft of him fill your palm.

An incorruptible man, corrupted.

Opposites attract, you think, and then bite the notion in half when he slides in as deep as he can go, husking out a muted fuck, fuck, fuck, feels so fuckin' good into your shoulder. Opposites, maybe. But something about the way he grabs you hard enough to leave marks on your bones, drags you back into his harsh ruts, his frantic pace, makes you think something reckless, something damning, lives inside him, too.

(He never would have let you tug his trousers down over his hips, let you arch over the table for him, if he didn't, after all.)

"This is—" his breath is humid on your skin, hands spasming over your flesh. You taste clarity in his words. Cognisance bleeds into them, spilling panic, and frenzied worry over your flesh. "This is stupid. We're gonna get caught—"

He huffs, and the rough scratch of his beard skates over your skin when he mouths against the curve of your bone.

There is a moment when you think he might pull away. Where the urge, the drive, to be proper and pious, prim and good, brim up through the overwhelming dizziness of cacoëthes that spindles through your marrow, but you arch into him until you're pressed taut to his hips, full and gasping from having big Bear inside of you this deep, and tuck it back into the box it snuck out of.

There's no place for decency when he has you bent over a table where anyone can wander past and see how good you take him.

So, you push back against him, taking him in as deep as you can, and then deeper still when his hips stutter at the sudden push. It edges into too much when he's pressed flush against the soft curve of your ass, but you swallow down the whimper, and rock back on your heels, swaying against him until all you see is hazy gunmetal swimming in front of your eyes.

It's always on that uneven edge of pain with Bear—dual sensations of too much intermixed with a heady thrum of pleasure that buffers out everything. A test of your mettle. He quizzes you on the limits of your resolve when he bucks his hips, sliding inside as deeply as he can go. Eking out a place within you that you might have been untouched, undiscovered, until him.

Where his tests are physical—pushing into you as deep as he can, until you swallow him whole—you excel in destruction. The erosion of propriety. His self-control.

(He shatters so prettily in your hands, like a supernova scattering across the inky black sky.)

This, then, is his test.

And he clues into it almost as quickly as the plan formed inside your head, spooling fast and recklessly in that place that convinces you that adrenaline is your friend, and that climbing higher is always the goal. The spot inside that makes you always pick dare instead of truth.

Bear knows—knew—of your plans when you pressed your lips to his, and still let you. A quick glance to the open doorway as you slide your tongue against his. The press of his fingers on the bow of your lips, a firm admonishment not to be too loud.

You could take it as:

Don't let us get caught.

And you do. But you also hear the unsaid words murmured into your ear when he fucked you harder, hips pistoning into you as if daring you to make a sound:

Don't let this end too soon.

"You're so bad, Bear," you coo, words tangled in pleasure as the blunt head of his cock batters into that spot behind your navel that never fails to make you sing. It rises. A quick flash of heat roiling in your belly; the whine of a coil being pulled too tight. Liquid bliss in red-hot agony. "Fucking me like this. I bet you want them to see. I bet you want them to watch you fuck me, don't you?"

The hiccup in your voice belies the accusations in your words. A tremulous, teasing warble that is met with his sharp, heady groan.

"Oh, f–fuck—"

He's close. You feel him swell. Hear the rumble in chest as he loses that mechanical rhythm; a stutter of his breath, his hips. The bones in your hip ache when he digs in tight, holding you still as he pounds you with a fury unmatched by anyone else you'd ever known. He takes you like he's working out a problem. Like he's on the opposite lines of an allegiance, and is trying to fuck you stupid enough to ramble out the answers to the questions he asks. It disintegrates into madness. Desperation. His measured thrusts grow sloppy. His breaths ragged.

The implosion of his self-control is almost more euphoric than the flood of molten pleasure blooming in your core. Your release offset by the unignorable crumbling of his resolve.

"Come for me, Bear," you pant, your breath whitening the gunmetal table with plumes of condensation. "Come for me—"

His hand presses against the smooth slope of your neck, pushing your cheek into the slick table. His thick fingers spasm as he grows frantic, desperately chasing his own end in your spasming body, ready to follow you—quick and reckless—over the edge of a precipice, filled with an adrenaline-rush spiking through the pleasure.

Things just feel better when it's dangerous, after all.

Bear comes with a groan he can bare smother, pulling your hips back into his as he spends himself inside of you, the punchy grunts of a well-earned victory tumbling from his lips. The sound bounces off the condensation-slick walls, renting the air in two. His heavy breaths are magnified in the sudden absence of silence that always seems to follow a loud sound.

His misery-filled groan is muffled by the back of your crown when he tips forward, and buries his face into your hair. In his defeat, you victory. A sweet damnation that you relish as he struggles to regain footing after losing control. His brassbound resolve is still in tatters, and spilled across the back of the table he'll use tomorrow with everyone else, haunted by the images of you spread out and willing as he tries to pretend he doesn't know what it feels like to grip the end of the table and fuck you senseless in a room designed to amplify all sound.

You grin into the metal when he husks out a mangled fuck into your sweat-slicked hair. It reeks of resignation. Of a man who stood so long on the crown of propriety slinking down to the depths of hedonism and bliss. Breaking the rules feels almost as good as fucking on top of them, and your mind races with all the ways you can break him again.

And Bear, as usual, has a tap into that place inside that leaks bad ideas, and can only shake his head with a huff.

He doesn't even bother saying no.

(Caulder owes you ten bucks. It seems you can teach an old, pious seal new tricks.)

Your legs are still shaking like a newborn fawn. You feel him inside you still, and the phantom stretch of him touching places and pieces of yourself he really shouldn't makes you quiver. The ache in your thighs is the good kind, though. The lasting impression of success after obtaining exactly what you set out to do.

Climbing a mountain. Running five miles. Fucking Bear Graves in the locker room with everyone else just a breath away.

(Check, check, and check—)

He helps you into the truck, eyes sweeping over your shoulder to look for anyone else in the parking lot who might ask questions. Solid, reasonable ones like why do you stink like sex? and did you just fuck them in the locker room, Bear?

You could try and reassure him that it's empty. That no one cares. That it's all in his head.

But you like the clench of his jaw, the flash of teeth when you giggle at him. Once the high of his release comes down, anger will follow. The kind that makes him loom. He'll lecture you about safety and decorum and not to sneak into his work to fuck him—

He'll wind himself up. Get himself nice and heated. He'll see it as a question to his authority. A tremor in his self-control.

And to regain the footing he lost—

Well.

It'll be a good night for you.

"You're a bad influence," he mumbles into your jaw, words muffled by his heavy breath he buckles you in.

You count each line in his forehead as a win, and try not to preen. "You love it."

#Joe Graves #Joe Graves x Reader #Bear Graves x Reader #i hate editing my stuff and tagging things #and that is all #Bear Graves #Bear x You

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tanadrin · 4 months

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@alightingdove

I'm fully aware of the weirdness. I'm very aware of the world's religions and their differences. My point is that the virtues of Buddhism are, generally, well-intentioned and sustainable from a secular perspective. We know why the Buddha became an ascetic - he witnessed sickness, aging, and death, and he decided to leave his luxurious life in pursuit of meaning.

Had to break this discussion out of the comments section because I think you're making a number of serious errors in your assumptions.

One--Buddhism is not an especially noble or enlightened religion. As this Buddhist and scholar of Buddhism points out, traditional Buddhist morality is deeply medieval, and very out of step with modern values. It is patriarchal, puritanical, and authoritarian. See also this post and this one.

Two--we have narratives about the Buddha, composed centuries after his death. As scholars of religion like Stephen Shoemaker and the cognitive scientists they have based their work on have pointed out, oral traditions are very bad at preserving authentic historical detail. They very quickly become adapted to serve the politics of later eras, and later traditions get written back onto the founders of movements to justify themselves. This is certainly true of Christianity, which had developed elaborate ahistorical traditions about Jesus within a hundred years of his death; it is even more true of Buddhism, whose oldest texts date to something like four hundred years after the Buddha's death. Islam, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and many other traditions centered on a single founder figure (even one who was certainly historical, like Muhammad) have similar problems.

Three--religions catch on for many reasons. "Disillusionment" seems to be only one factor out of many. People adopt new traditions because of politics, identity, millennarian fervor (very big in early Islam and Christianity), hope of strategic benefit (knowledge or power from the gods), because they're forced to under threat of violence, and so forth.

So I think it is a bad idea to ascribe particular generosity or wisdom to (or to be excessively deferential to) people who, even if the traditions surrounding them are entirely authentic, made claims about the world which are unprovable or outright false, and whose morality was repugnant. And it's especially a bad idea to do so just because they have proven historically successful, given that the reasons they have proven to be thus may be pretty arbitrary.

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telomeke · 3 months

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THE SIGN EPISODE 8 – WANWISA'S WARNING

We've been told before in The Sign that the 15th day of the 11th waxing moon is a date that is especially significant and powerful for the nagas.

The last day of the Buddhist Rains Retreat (also called Buddhist Lent by some), this date (Wan Ok Phansa) is mentioned by nagini Wansarut to Phaya's previous garuda incarnation at Ep.8 [3‌/4] 8.37 as the date when the Buddha returned to the human world "from the second heaven where Indra dwells", and the nagas and naginis breathed out fireballs in his honor.

And this is why the Naga Fireball Festival is also held around the time of Wan Ok Phansa.

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Separately, at Ep.3 [3‌/4] 12.26 (when Tharn and Phaya explore the Dinphiang Cave) Sand's voiceover also recounts the legend of the naga princess who is compelled to return to her watery homeland underground on the date of Wan Ok Phansa (the 15th day of the 11th waxing moon, or the last day of Buddhist Lent), and loses her human lover in the process.

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So Chalothorn must have been biding his time for this particularly auspicious date to come around, when he would finally be empowered to take back his betrothed nagini princess, and break the connection once and for all between garuda Phaya and naga Tharn/Wansarut (and is the gist of Wansarut's golden nagini sister Wanwisa's warning).

Chalothorn must have been attempting to kill Phaya from early on in order to prevent him from obstructing the greater scheme of reclaiming Wansarut/Tharn from the reincarnation cycle and reinstating his nagini's semi-divine status, away from the garuda.

But of course all attempts on Phaya's life by Chalothorn were futile, as he was under the protection of Tharn's nagini-soul amulet (that the Thai subtitles also call a naga gem, akin to Wansarut's heart) – the physical embodiment of Wansarut's dying vow to protect her beloved garuda throughout all future reincarnations:

Wansarut's vow here also reveals the supernatural impetus behind all the times Tharn saved Phaya's life earlier, e.g., during the Ep.1 mock-hostage rescue and open water challenge, the encounter with the masked Molotov knife-man in Ep.4, and the battle with the tattooed serial killer in Ep.5. 😢

It's consistently been the bigger, macho Phaya being saved by the smaller, slighter Tharn/Wansarut. And this is just one of the many ways that The Sign has been bucking expectations of a Thai BL series. 🤩 But come the next Wan Ok Phansa it will be time for Phaya to prove his worth in return, and battle to save his fated lover Tharn/Wansarut from the clutches of the possessive naga Chalothorn instead. 😔

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#the sign #the sign the series #naga and garuda #phayatharn #the sign phaya #the sign tharn #the sign wansarut #the sign wanwisa

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quitealotofsodapop · 5 days

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So can we get more context on this situation for the Tang River Water au?

referencing this au.

Literally one of the first things Peng does when they get released from the Scroll is to try and kill who he thinks is Tripitaka [Tang]. Peng presses on Tang so forcefully that the stone around him cracks. Tang doesn't be looking so great afterwards either.

Only reason Tang isn't passing through Diyu after this scene is Azure mentioning that he's just the monk's reincarnation (which 100% must have tickles Peng pink since they of all people know how embarassing it must have been for Buddha's teacher's pet to fail to break the cycle of rebirth). I have seen aus where Tang does die in this scene and his Golden Cicada powers have to come in clutch to keep his soul there. (link to a really cool animatic)

But in the "Mother Child River Tang" au?

Peng immediately takes one look at this *obviously* pregnant monk and just starts screeching with laughter! You know that sound peacock's make thats like a strangled laugh? That is all Peng is doing for their first five minutes out of the Scroll.

Yellow Tusk has already given Azure a warm welcoming hug and gotten caught up on the most recent millenium by the time Peng manages to catch their breath.

Peng: "The- [peacock cry]! The monk is- [more peacock cries!] ahhhhh! I can't even be mad at him right now! It's so funny!" Tang, still a little hurt, now offended: "Rude. A pregnant man isn't that funny." Peng: "But a pregnant monk is! Looks like that vow of chasity didn't stick eh?" Azure: "Peng, they are not the monk." Peng, laughter stops: "...then who the Diyu are they??" Tang, emboldened: "I'm Tang! Reincarnation and/or decendant of the Great Monk! And this is my husband Pigsy, our son MK, and our friends." Peng, tears in eyes: "HE MARRIED THE-!" [peacock cry!] Azure & Yellow tusk: *both sigh tiredly*

On a more serious note, since Sandy was forced to push Tang out of the way of Yellow tusk's attack + Peng pinned him to the ground, the Monkey King's part of the Scroll is damaged, MK is having a mental breakdown, and if we combine this with "Slow Boiled Stone Egg" au - the Brotherhood has taken Yuebei Xing hostage? Tang is in a lot of physical and emotional distress rn.

Like... enough to trigger early labor-level of distress.

Bodhisattva Guanyin is summoned immediately to Subodhi's temple before any actual training can occur. She's (and many other buddhist deities) so preoccupied in making sure that the Golden Cicada and his baby survives that they are distracted from the threat sieging Heaven at that moment...

Pigsy has to be held back from trying to tear the Brotherhood apart himself. Zhu Bajie wasn't *just* "some demon". He used to be one of the most powerful Marshals in Heaven - commanding 80 thousand heavenly sailors/soldiers. In one mythology, Marshal Tianpeng was even a son of Doumu - the mother of constellations (making him the Queen Mother of the West's brother oddly enough).

Whos to say that Pigsy doesn't accidentally tap into the powers of that life? The whole naval power of Heaven is suddenly at Subodhi's school, waiting for the orders to turn the Brotherhood into a fine red smear on the wall. It's only Tang's own pleading that Pigsy doesn't act rashly.

The chaos does lead to an odd conciencidence occuring though...

Nezha, post-s4: "I do wonder... has the Jade Emperor broken the cycle of rebirth? If not, then that means the location of his soul could prove dangerous if left unchecked. I must contact the Underworld." *starts mediatating* MK: "What do you mean?" Nezha: "The Emperor was eons old. That amount of acculmilated divine power needs a host that can handle it. Like-" Tang & Pigsy's baby: *snorts/burps loudly* Nezha, realising: "-the child of the Golden Cicada and of the Doumu herself..." Yama, King of Hell, astral projecting: "You guys are not gonna believe where the Emperor ended up! He's in a half-demon piglet somewhere- oh there she is!" Tang & Pigsy: ( 0_0) (0_0 ) "uh oh"

#mother child river tang au #slow boiled stone egg au #lmk aus #pregnancy tw #lmk tang #lmk pigsy #lmk peng #lmk azure lion #freenoddles #freenoodlesshipping #lmk #lego monkie kid

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dorothygale123 · 6 months

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I'd say I'm becoming a nerd, but that ship sailed a long time ago. I guess I'm just expanding my nerdiness to other areas.

Anyway, MORE MYTHOLOGY!

So in Journey to the West, the Buddha explains that there are 4 'spiritual primates' that don't fit into any categories for immortals or types of creatures. Fans of Lego Monkie Kid are likely familiar with 2, the Stone Monkey Sun Wukong and the Six Eared Macaque. The other 2, the Long-armed Gibbon and the Red-Buttocked Baboon are a lot more obscure. They only get a brief mention in JttW because the focus of the chapter they appear in is Macaque, but the idea of a set of super powerful Immortal monkeys is just too fun to pass up, you know? So I've been thunking my thinker.

What if each primate was associated with a different realm (mortal, heavenly, lunar, and underworld) and element? I know the 4 elements (earth, water, wind, fire) are a western idea rooted in alchemy and eastern mythology has 5 elements (earth, water, fire, metal, wood), but there aren't 5 monkeys and this is just a thought experiment and not me trying to force western ideas onto eastern culture.

Got it? Good.

Now, Sun Wukong is very solidly earth because he's, you know, a rock. No surprise there. He was also born in the mortal realm and spent most of his life there, so we'll call him the celestial primate of the mortal realm while we're at it.

The Six-Eared Macaque is another easy one. A lot of LMK fannon associates him with wind, inferring that his heightened hearing has something to do with wind magic. He's also very closely tied to the moon because of the line in "Shadow Play" where he directly compares the Warrior (himself) to the moon. So Macaque is the celestial primate of wind and the Lunar realm.

Now here's where we get a bit more speculative and start using information creatively. There are 2 monkeys, realms, and elements left I want to use, so let's start with the monkeys so everyone has a baseline understanding.

The Long Armed Gibbon (Gibs, from now on) is described as being able to "seize the sun and moon, shorten a thousand mountains, distinguish auspicious from inauspicious, and manipulate planets and stars."

The Red Buttocked Baboon (Babs for short) has "knowledge of yin and yang, understands human affairs, is adept I'd daily life and can avoid death and lengthen its life."

Starting with the realms because they seem easiest to assign, I would give Gibs the Heavenly realm because of its ability to move around celestial objects like the sun, moon, planets, and stars. This leaves the Underworld to Babs, which I think fits nicely because their "knowledge of yin and yang" and "understand[ing] of human affairs" would make them a good assistant to the 10 Kings of the Underworld.

Next comes the 2 remaining elements, water and fire, which are a bit tricky because it could go both ways.

Gibs could be fire because the sun and stars are giant balls of burning plasma, but also water because the sky/heavens are often associated with an ocean or other bodies of water in several different mythologies. For example, in Egyptian mythology, Ra sailed his boat through the sky every day, while in early Abrahamic belief the sky was a huge dome with water on the other side, and rain happened when floodgates were opened to let the water through. In Chinese myth specifically, the Milky Way is often depicted as a river that is sailed through by various deities.

Babs could fit with fire as well because underworlds and hell-adjacent places are often shown to have fires to torment and punish the sinful dead, no surprise there. But there is surprisingly a lot of water symbolism in the realm of the dead as well. For example, some people may be familiar with the Japanese idea of the Sanzu River, very similar in concept to the Greek River Styx, as well as the Chinese Huang Quan/Yellow springs.

Personally I would pair Babs with fire because he has red in his name, making him the celestial primate of fire and the Underworld.

That leaves Gibs to be the celestial primate of water and the Heavenly realm.

I feel pretty good about this, but if anyone else has other ideas I'd love to hear them.

Sh*tpost Masterlist

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thequietkid-moonie · 1 year

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For ROR, was wondering about any headcannon or drabbles you may have of Buddha, Shiva, and Hercules as dads??

Parenting headcanons

[ PLATONIC HEADCANONS ] [ Buddha, Shiva, Heracles ]

[ Records of Ragnarok / Shuumatsu no Valkyrie ]

Buddha's part is dedicated to the simp of the four sages, i miss u 🥺

Just a cute reminder that here you are the child 🐭

My conclusion is Buddha besto father ✨✨

Buddha

Buddha is a pretty chill man and that won't really change when he becomes a father, he isn't exactly estrict and he let his child do whatever they wants, still he can get protective over you (specially with the gods)

Buddha actually loves parenting, finding pretty cute almost everything you do, specially when you were a baby, just holding you gently close to him make his day way better, and he loves seeing you grow up too

That is why Buddha can get pretty clingy to you, wherever he goes you go with him and he is always carrying you, in his arms, in his back or in his shoulders, wherever you prefer

Since Buddha used to be a prince he has received a very good education, and he will teach you all knowledge he remember along side with all that he had learn in his own

He is a really supportive father for whatever you want to do, doesn't matter is an ambitious goal or something more simple you will always have his support

Even when he let you do whatever you want he makes sure you don't forget to be respectful, you have to respect other as well as others have to respect you, even him, he tell you more than once that if he ever feel that he is been disrespectful or invase with you don't hesitant on tell him

Is for sure that you will meet the other sages too, but Buddha doesn't fully trust them to take care of you (specially in your early life) just because he knows the mess they are he is the same, but will never stop you from hanging out with them and they loves having you around, so is a win win for everyone

Buddha says that he doesn't like to brag about whatever he did, but he actually do love it and a lot but just with you because he loves seeing you amazed and proud expression whenever he tell you how he become the man he is now. And that is a negative point with the sages, because while your papa tell you amaizing stories about him the sages tell you stories about the irresponsable mess he is whenever he is with them (specially Confucious and Jesus)

The moment you start having friends with people your age or just people you like he just motivate you to go with them not really interfering, even when he doesn't seem affected by it is just matter of time for him to start to feel lonely without you around all the time (and he tells that to the other sages just to be dramatic and mess with them)

Shiva

If someone ask him about his child he normally don't say much, he acts like isn't a big deal, it isn't not like he doesn't like his newborn because he does and a lot, is just that he doesn't show it to others but he is extremely happy for this and he tent to spend all his time with his child, specially when you were just a baby

Your naps are the perfect excuse for him to be lazy, he says that he just want to look after you while you sleep but he always end up sleep too, it got pretty common to find Shiva sleep with you on top of him (sleeping too)

He won't admit it out loud but he is weak to your cuteness, whenever you do something cute (that for him is almost everything you do) he melt, leading Shiva to spoil you a lot, if there is something you want you will have it, he just can't bring himself to say not to cute little you

He grows pretty clingy to you, always wanting to hold you in his arms and play with you, but as you grow up he start to give you more freedom, not like he has been possessive is just that he loves spending time with you

He loves braging about all the adventures he had in the past and all the fights he had to become the man he is now (he may or may not exaggerate or lengthen the story to make it more exciting because he loves to see your amazed expression)

He isn't exactly estrict so is more probably that Parvati, Kali and Durga will be the ones who look after your education more. Although you are free to choose the direction your life will take once you grow up

Shiva introduce you to everyone he knows, still he is a little protective over you so if he notice that you are comfortable or someone is bothering you (even if is his friend) he will stand up for you, no matter what age you are he always will stand up for you

Once you start getting your own friends and wanting to go out without your parents Shiva gets a little jealous but he won't stop you from doing it, you have to explore the world on your own and find what you want to do

Shiva is totally the type of father that will tell your friends embarrasing stories about you because he find them cute and to mess with you

Heracles

Heracles is a caring and pretty protective father, he is mixed between wanting to protect his child from everything and anything and wanting to let them explore the world on his own

When you were just a baby he was really nervious about carrying you, is just that you were so small and tiny that he is worried that he would hurt you, it takes him a while to get used to but he end up loving holding you close to him

Heracles isn't exactly clingy but he likes to spend a lot of time with his child, and he gives you more freedom as you grow, again because he wants for you to explore and learn all you want

Also he used to carry you around all the time as a baby but as you grow he stop doing it so much for you to walk around all you want, although he will never say no whenever you ask him to carry you, no matter what age you have

Heracles will introduce you to the gods and humans he know (mainly the ones that are of his fully trust, specially when you were just a toddler), although he won't force you to get along with them, he hopes you will but won't force you if you don't

Since he is a god he will be busy from time to time so he will have to leave you with someone capable of taking care of you (probably Hermes), and, of course, it has to be someone you like and are comfortable with

Speaking of, whenever he goes out to fullfil a work he always tries to bring something for you on his way back, a gift of something he knows you will like (no matter how old you are he keeps doing it), and he always tell you the story of his adventure (avoiding disgusting details)

He isn't someone who likes to brag, but he can't say not to you whenever you ask him about the stories of all his adventures. And if you see him or tell him that he is a hero he will be so flustered by it and it gives him a lot of motivation to continue with his work

He want for you to grow up as someone caring and strong, he tell you that you should respect everyone, gods and humans, just as they have should respect you too. He won't let you be revelious but he isn't aggresive when confronting you

If you want learn how to fight he will happy to teach you (but will go easy on you since the circumstances aren't forcing you to become stronge like were when he a young human), but then again if you aren't interested on it is fine, he wont force you

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kaibutsushidousha · 9 months

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Thoughts on Kiara and the CCC Sakura's?

Kiara is a character that took time to warm up. I played CCC and loved Kiara and Anderson as a pair but didn't like either character individually. SE.RA.PH also impressed me very little, but she got a fun part to play in Paradise Lake so that's one contribution from FGO. But it was with her part in Tsukihime, literally just two lines of dialogue, that I got to think back and realize that I like Kiara, actually.

Anyways, the central idea that defines the whole of Kiara's character is that she doesn't know how to read. She's an unstoppable force that reshapes the world with her genius of religion, sexuality, psychology, programming, and magecraft, but literature is her weakest subject. She's blind to themes and symbolism, dull to metaphors, and unaware of subtext.

Her story is that she was born with the saintly nature of a bodhisattva, but confined to a bed in an isolationist Tachikawa cult. It was a harsh childhood where she was sick and objectified but she had the company of books telling her the teaching of the Buddha and heartwarming tales like The Little Mermaid.

Her life changed at age 14 when she was introduced to the internet. Thanks to it, she learned her disease was easily treatable and fixed herself, but most importantly, she discovered no one in her village healed despite it being super simple. Remember this is a Buddhist devotee who sucks at reading. She grew up reading that the sattva defines sentient beings as any life capable of compassion, and with her abysmal interpretation skills, believed this was completely literal. Therefore, the people around her weren't sentient. By Kiara's dumbass definition, was the only human being she knew.

What makes Kiara is the fact that her dehumanization of others and the power her talents give her over people's lives often lead to megalomania. People kill themselves en masse over her and her reaction is thinking that's hot, actually. People confront and checkmate her and her reaction is to kill herself before the hero who took so many innocent lives to reach can have the satisfaction of doing it. (Amazingly timely with the new SE.RA.PH chapter that came the day after I received this ask)

But despite her pride consistently getting the better of her, that pride is still derived from the fact she is sentient, therefore capable of compassion. She's a natural-born bodhisattva (mostly) always extending the hand of salvation to those beneath her. Just... the functionally illiterate Tachikawa Buddhist way, which involves making the entire world nut into moksha. But hey, at least her heart is in the right place. I can fix her. (Note: this does not mean you can fix her. I'm talking specifically about myself because, at least on paper, I'm a licensed Japanese literature teacher)

CCC is the story of her attempt to cheat the Holy Grail War in order to reach the Enlightenment necessary for this, and her partner there is Andersen, the author of her favorite childhood stories. Andersen's Noble Phantasm can reshape fate to ensure her plot goes as intended but under the condition it must be true to the themes of Andersen's stories. And understanding the themes just happens to be Kiara's greatest weakness.

Kiara hacked the ability to fall in love into a Mooncell superior AI to she could seduce Sakura into giving her early access to the Grail, but when Hakuno shows up for Sakura's help first, Kiara decided it was hotter that way and left Hakuno to do the brunt of her work. At this moment, her loss is already decided. No matter how many times she lovingly read Andersen's tales, she's a poor enough reader to never have realized he's a writer that punishes his protagonists for short-sightedness. The Little Mermaid and The Girl Who Sells Matches died for this.

The type of protagonist Andersen rewards are the ones like The Ugly Duckling, who never have it easy until they reach the discovery that changes their lives. And Kiara just made Hakuno into The Ugly Duckling of CCC instead of her.

In reality, Kiara could never get what she was asking for out of Andersen. Her win condition under his literary themes was for Sakura's love and Kiara's interactions with the rest of the CCC cast to make her find compassion in others, grow out of her messiah complex, and find ordinary happiness in the company of her fellow sentient human beings.

And that's all from CCC, but Kiara is one of the most recurring characters in current TM, so we have FGO and Tsukihime showing different facets of Kiara under the circumstances of different timelines.

FGO ultimately hijacks its Kiara with her CCC counterpart, but before that, she has a quite fascinating set of circumstances. Here we have a genuinely saintly Kiara. Unlike in CCC, here she was visited and cured by a wandering doctor instead of finding the solution to her illness on her own, so she never had the opportunity to arrive at her "I'm the only human being" mentality. After leaving her hometown, she still became a qualified therapist as usual, but this time earnestly dedicated to the benefit of her fellow sentient beings.

But the curious thing about this deviation in her backstory is how it relies on the FGO timeline having some wandering doctor in 2006 who somehow didn't exist in any other timeline to help Kiara there too. Unrelated picture of Dr. Romani Archaman (2004-2016) during his initial years of globetrotting before he returned to Marisbury.

Anyways, the transplanted CCC Kiara is defeated and drops her Alterego in Chaldea out of curiosity. Her next main story role is in Oo'oku, she gets to find her opposite in Kama and ultimately drags her to a new home where the two of them can find the simple happiness they lacked, preferably far away from each other. Lastly, her summer in Paradise Lake shows off a more balanced Kiara, still kinda high on the messiah complex and still the bad reader demanding a sequel for the sake of a sequel, but knowing where the draw the line. The AnKia fluff is also sublime as always.

Then Tsukihime is technically Kiara's latest appearance. She only gets two lines to explain her backstory, and it's honestly the funniest thing ever done with her megalomania. Tsuki Kiara is completely successful in her ascension to the rank of Maradeva but learned how much of a small fry she was compared to the True Devils of the Buddhist universe and noped back to Earth where she was still almighty (does that make her a tengu or am I being as literal about Buddhist definitions as her?). Tsuki Kiara has no excuses left to pretend this isn't about her ego first and foremost, but at least she found a place in the Burial Agency, where she can still offer others some kinda salvation.

Anon is also asking about the Sakuras, but I think I'll leave that for another time in another ask because this has already gotten really long just talking about Kiara. Sorry for delivering only half the answer.

#type moon #fate extra ccc #fate grand order #tsukihime #sesshouin kiara #hans cristian andersen

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moodboardmix · 1 year

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Ryuichi Sakamoto (January 17, 1952 - March 28, 2023)

Professor Sakamoto was one of Japan’s most successful musicians, acclaimed for work in Yellow Magic Orchestra as well as solo albums and film scores.

As a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto created joyous and progressive electronic pop in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside solo releases. He acted alongside David Bowie in the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and composed its Celebrated theme, the first in a series of film scores including Oscar-winning work in 1987 with David Byrne and Cong Su for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.

Alongside YMO, Sakamoto continued releasing solo albums including 1980’s B-2 Unit, another influence on the robotically funky sound of electro that also foreshadowed other dance music styles. After focusing purely on solo work, he forged further connections in the west, collaborating with musicians including Iggy Pop, Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, David Sylvian and more. Sylvian contributed Forbidden Colours, a vocal version of one of Sakamoto’s most famous works, the theme to second world war drama Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Sakamoto also starred in the film as a prisoner of war camp commander.

Following The last Emperor (in which he also had an acting role), he collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci again for The Last Buddha, and with Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence director Nagisa Oshima for Gohatto. He also scored two films by Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale), plus Wild Palms for Oliver Stone, High Heels for Pedro Almodóvar, the 1990 film adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, and more. His 2015 score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film The Revenant was nominated for Golden Globe, Bafta and Grammy awards. In 2019, he composed the music for an episode of dystopian TV drama series Black Mirror. He took no further acting roles, aside from appearing as a film director in Rain, a music video for Madonna.

Mr Sakamoto released a steady schedule of solo releases throughout the 1990s and onwards, and wrote a piece for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. In 1999 he debuted the multimedia opera project Life, in collaboration with artist Shiro Takatani with contributions from Bertolucci, Pina Bausch and more. He and Takatani extended the concept into installation work from 2007 onwards.

Also in 2007, he began the ambitious Schola project, curating 17 compilations of global music ranging from composers such as Ravel and Beethoven to Japanese pop. It was released via his record label Commons, set up in 2006, which has also released work by artists including Boredoms and OOIOO.

In 2002, he began a fruitful partnership with German musician Carsten Nicolai, who used his Alva Noto alias for four collaborative albums of minimalist electronica.

Mr Sakamoto was also an environmental campaigner, opposing the use of nuclear power, and creating the forestry project More Trees to enable carbon offsetting.

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

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virgobingo · 3 months

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geto's design really is so interesting bc there are definitely things you are meant to superficially associate with delinquency like the bontan pants and the gauges/earrings—

but also,

i think we are meant to see geto as fashion-conscious. still, maybe a little late in the game? bontan pants were allegedly trendy amongst boys in the early 90s; geto went to hs in the late 00s. which could be another way for gege to imply that geto's from a rural town. geto who knows trends but who's also a little bit behind. this choice could also be interpreted as him not caring for trends either.. geto as someone that simply likes what he likes.

as for his earrings, the earrings are meant to weigh his lobes down and remind us of the buddha no doubt. on an individual level, within the story, i think we're also meant to note how it's not exactly a conservative practice (just like kirara's facial piercings aren't). i think it's meant to be seen as forward thinking? alternative? especially because they are so big.

obv by comparison his jacket is a little more simple, less radical. it's mostly made cute by the fact that it's sort of implied that gojo went out of his way to make his jacket match with geto's,

++it's worth pointing out that while his tabi shoes are stylish and comfortable, they also help tie back geto to japan's history/more traditional stuff. in a similar way his long hair does. note that while japan has a long history of men with long hair, it really is more common to see men with short hair these days. (this is probably due to life being too hectic in the modern era).

anyways, not heading anywhere in particular with this post. simply thinking of fashion as a form of self-expression and control over geto's life?

#will notice so many typos later #jujutsu kaisen #geto suguru

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yamayuandadu · 3 months

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"Tenma, boss of the tengu". Exploring the "heavenly demon(s)"

The identity of Tenma, the leader of tengu in Touhou, remains a mystery. I think only ZUN can solve it - if he ever chooses to, obviously. Therefore, this is not quite an article meant to prove I figured out who Tenma is. Instead, it presents the origin of this name, and introduces a handful of figures in various contexts portrayed as leaders of the tengu who I think would be interesting candidates for the position of Tenma.

My additional goal is to show that even though popculture tends to portray all tengu as basically interchangeable, there is actually a fair share of unique tales about specific named members of this category. Corrupt monks! Vengeful spirits! Visitors from far off lands! There’s even a sea monster converted to Buddhism! Obviously, this isn’t supposed to be a list of every single named tengu and every single story. It’s not even a list of all of my favorite tengu. It’s simply an attempt at convincing you that digging deeper into tengu background is worth it - and in particular that there is still a lot to speculate about when it comes to their leader in Touhou. It’s some of the best oc free real estate in the series, really. Due to technical difficulties, the bibliography is included as a Google Docs link rather than a part of the article. I'm sorry.

From Mara to tengu: the development of the concept of tenma

Silhouette of a tengu negotiating with Kanako in WaHH 38, sometimes labeled as Tenma on fan sites through debatable exegesis.

As we originally learned in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, Gensokyo’s tengu are ruled by an individual named Tenma (天魔). Akyuu simply describes them as the “tengu’s boss” and provides no further information. While some additional tidbits have since surfaced here and there, they largely remain a mystery. Next to Chang’e, the unseen fourth deva of the mountain and the fourth Beast Realm figurehead they’re easily the highest profile unseen character in the entire series.

While in absence of information on the contrary we cannot necessarily assume that Tenma isn’t a given name in Touhou, ZUN did not actually come up with this term. It has been a significant part of tengu background at least since the Kamakura period. It can be translated as “heavenly demon”, and it’s a shortened form of Dairokuten Maō (第六天魔王), “Demon King of Sixth Heaven”, the Japanese name of Mara. Tenma is explained as a synonym of Mara’s “personal name” Hajun (波旬; Sanskrit Pāpīyas) for instance in the treatise Makashikan (摩訶止観; translation of Chinese Móhē Zhǐguān, “Great Cessation and Insight”).

Is that all there is to the mystery of Tenma? For what it’s worth, a possible reference to the full form of Mara’s name can be found in a description of Okina’s ability card in Unconnected Marketeers, which mentions “Tenma living in paradise”. I don’t think this is very strong evidence, though.

Touhou aside, it is hard to deny tengu are fundamentally tied to Mara. They are directly described as his subjects in Buddhist works such as Soseki Musō’s (1275–1351) Muchū mondō (夢中問答集; “Questions and Answers in Dreams”) and Unshō’s (運敞; 1614–1693) Jakushōdō Kokkyōshū (寂照堂谷響集). However, it needs to be stressed that a being referred to as Tenma does not necessarily have to be Mara himself.

A plurality of Maras theoretically became possible as soon as the belief this name didn’t designate an individual, but rather a position which could be held by various individuals or a category of beings developed in Buddhism. The former idea already appears in the Māratajjanīya, a part of the Theravada Buddhist Majjhima Nikāya, dated to the late first millennium BCE or early first millennium CE. Maudgalyāyana, one of the disciples of the historical Buddha, reveals in it that he was (a) Mara in a past life, and thus can easily notice the presence of the present Mara. The shift from a singular Mara (魔, mo) to an assortment of “demon kings” (魔王, mowang) is also well documented in early Buddhist sources from China.

As a curiosity it’s worth noting that even though the terms mo and mowang originally referred to strictly Buddhist demons, they were also incorporated into Daoist traditions, especially Lingbao and Shangqing. For example the former school's central text Duren Jing (度人經; “Scripture for Universal Salvation”) maintains that multiple mowang exist. While some of these “demon kings” are tempters not too dissimilar from their Buddhist forerunner (though what they obstruct is attaining the distinctly Daoist form of transcendence - in other words, immortality), others are portrayed as judges responsible for determining the fates of people in the afterlife. In later sources the term mo sometimes also refers to supernatural pathogens (generally 邪, xie or 邪氣, xiequi).

Sun Wukong and his fellow pilgrims battling the Bull Demon King on a mural from the Summer Palace in Beijing (wikimedia commons)

You don’t really need to look for any particularly obscure sources to see this transformation of Mara into a generic moniker, though - even the Bull Demon King from Journey to the West has the compound 魔王 in his name. Same goes for numerous other antagonists from this work.

When it comes to Japanese sources, it also doesn’t require looking for anything particularly obscure to find evidence in the belief in multiplicity of ma or tenma.

In the historical epic Heike Monogatari, emperor Go-Shirakawa implores Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin to explain the nature of tenma to him. He reveals that this term refers to monks and scholars who, despite nominally following Buddhism, lacked the mindset needed to attain enlightenment. He compares them to birds of prey, but also states they belong to the “dog species”. All of these are nods to well established beliefs about tengu, which I discussed in my previous article, with a reference to the writing of their name on top of that. It comes as no surprise that right after that Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin specifies that “the wise men of the eight sects who become tenma are called tengu”. He also makes it clear the tenma are quite numerous: “nine out of ten will definitely become tenma and try to destroy the Law of Buddha,” he warns.

A plurality of tenma can also be found in assorted biographies of pious Buddhist reborn in a pure land, so-called ōjōden (往生伝). The Tendai treatise Asabashō (阿娑縛抄) attributes the ability to “subdue all tenma” - evidently a class of beings, not an individual - to Fudō Myōō.

Through the rest of the article, I will introduce some of these tenma - the most famous tengu. My goal is not to convince you that any of them is a uniquely plausible candidate for the role of the unseen Touhou Tenma - I merely would like to point out there are multiple interesting options.

The oneness of vice and virtue: Ryōgen, the ruler of Makai

The historical Ryōgen (left) and his deomic alter ego Tsuno Daishi (wikimedia commons)

Before Ryōgen (912–985) came to be seen as a tengu, he was one of the most influential members of the Tendai school of Buddhism to ever live. He reformed the Enryaku-ji complex on Mt. Hiei, took part in numerous theological debates, and gained the favor of the imperial court by supposedly enabling the birth of an heir of emperor Murakami with his prayers. He was also renowned as a master of esoteric protective rituals.

The proponents of the Tendai establishment understood him as a fearsome protector of this tradition. As early as 50 years after his death, in the 1030s, he came to be identified as the reincarnation of Tendai’s founder Saichō. He was also considered a manifestation of one of the eight dragon kings, Uhatsura (優鉢羅; from Sanskrit Utpalaka). Ōe no Masafusa states that in this form he continued to protect Mt. Hiei, instead of being reborn in a pure land. This idea continued to spread, and by the end of the Kamakura period he came to be commonly revered as a protective figure by all strata of society. Haruko Wakabayashi notes that only Kūkai developed a similar cult in Japan as far as patriarchs of the esoteric Buddhist schools go.

It was not Ryōgen’s ability to navigate complex doctrinal debates about the interpretation of sutras that resulted in his popularity, but rather his esoteric skills. He was supposedly uniquely accomplished when it came to subduing anything which could be described as ma. In a Konjaku Monogatari tale I’ll discuss in more detail later, he effortlessly overcomes a tengu, for instance. However, in addition to spiritual obstacles and demons, the ma he was supposed to conquer also included political opponents, rebels or brigands, as the Buddhist law and the interests of the state were understood as identical. Ryōgen’s efficiency was so great he came to be viewed as a manifestation of Fudo Myōō, one of the wisdom kings and the conqueror of ma par excellence.

Not everyone viewed Ryōgen positively, though. The earliest criticism came from his contemporaries. It was argued that he favored monks from aristocratic families, and that he lived in luxury unbefitting for a monk. Furthermore, numerous conflicts between monks erupted during his tenure as Enryakuji’s abbot, including the split between the Sanmon and Jimon lineages. Since in some cases this led to armed confrontations, later on he was blamed for essentially enabling the rise of militarized monks who commonly caused disturbances on Mt. Hiei.

The real breakthroughs were not these tangible “political” criticisms. Rather, it was the identification of Ryōgen as ma, which arose due to conflict between various schools of Buddhism in the early middle ages. Most commonly this meant portraying him as a tengu - as I explained in my previous article, the form arrogant or corrupt monks were believed to take. A variant tradition described him as an oni, though according to Bernard Faure this likely simply reflects a degree of interchangeability between them and tengu.

Ryōgen is arguably the most famous historical monk to be furnished with such a literary afterlife. An early example can be found in the Hōbutsushū from the twelfth century, which states that this was a result of his attachment to Enryaku-ji. In Jimon Kōsōki (寺門高僧記) it is instead his investment in doctrinal debates that made him unable to attain rebirth in a pure land.

A gathering of tengu leaders from Tengu Zōshi (wikimedia commons)

Since Ryōgen was no ordinary monk, his tengu self also had to be special. In the Tengu Zōshi (天狗草紙), he is described as the ruler of all tengu and the realm they inhabit, Makai (“world of ma”; also referred to as Tengudō). It's worth pointing out the notion of Makai being a place where monks turn into specific classes of supernatural beings is basically a core part of UFO’s plot, and in SoPM Miko even wonders if Byakuren shouldn’t be considered a tengu.

As a ruler of Makai, Ryōgen came to be referred to as a “demon king”, maō (魔王). An example can be found in the historical epic Taiheiki, where he is described as one of the “great demon kings” (大魔王, daimaō) who debate how to cause chaos in Japan. He is assisted by vengeful spirits of the emperors Sutoku (more on him later), Go-Toba and Go-Daigo; two members of the Minamoto clan who sided with Sutoku, Tameyoshi and Tametomo; and the monks Genbō, Shinzei (真済, 800-860; obscure today, but apparently well known as a monk turned tengu in the middle ages) and Raigō (who supposedly turned into the infamous “iron rat”).

In Hirasan Kojin Reitaku (比良山古人霊託; “The Spiritual Oracle of the Old Man of Mount Hira”) this is only a temporary fate, though: supposed by the time this work was compiled, he already managed to leave Tengudō. As I discussed last month, this reflects a fairly standard belief too: to become a tengu, one had to actually be a Buddhist, and while it made striving for enlightenment more difficult, it did not mean eternal damnation or anything of that sort. A tengu could still choose to pursue rebirth in a pure land - it was just more difficult than for a human.

The evolution of Ryōgen’s image didn’t end with the establishment of his new role as a king of tengu, or even with the arguments that he might have nonetheless subsequently attained enlightenment. By the end of the Kamakura period, he came to be worshiped explicitly in the form of a “demon king”. While initially polemical, this image of him came to be subverted by Tendai monks to their own ends. They asserted that Ryōgen did not enter the realm of ma because of his arrogance, but rather consciously chose to do so in order to protect Buddhist principles. By becoming the ruler of its inhabitants, he also became their ultimate conqueror.

The notion of a being who is simultaneously essentially Mara-like and a protector of Buddhism seems contradictory. That’s actually the intent here. Through the middle ages, the esoteric schools of Buddhism developed the notion of hongaku, or “original enlightenment”. In its light, opposites were in fact identical. Buddha was the same as Mara (魔仏一如, mabutsu ichinyo). As it was argued, to attain Buddha nature one had to understand and experience delusion as well. Thus virtuous individuals could become demon kings in order to freely control evil beings.

In addition to its deep philosophical implications, the hongaku theory was also used to reject criticisms of the Buddhist establishment. Enjoying luxuries was but a way to better understand delusion, and thus to advance along the path to enlightenment. Its proponents embraced some criticisms of Ryōgen: he did favor nobles, accumulate wealth and live arrogantly. He did become a powerful tengu. But all of this was in fact part of a noble goal. And on top of that, as a demon king he was an even more fearsome protector of Tendai than he would be otherwise.

"Tsuno Daishi and a snail" by Teisai Hokuba (Sumida Hokusai Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

The new role of Ryōgen warranted new iconography. While formerly portrayed simply as a monk holding the expected priestly attributes, in the Kamakura period he came to be depicted as Tsuno Daishi (角大師), the “Horned Master”. This image spread far and wide due to the development of a belief that hanging depictions of Ryōgen would guarantee the same protection Tendai institutions received from him. He came to be seen as particularly efficient in warding off disease. Many temples still distribute talismans depicting Tsuno Daishi today. This custom received a lot of press coverage in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and you might have seen some examples on social media. From vengeful spirit to tengu: the case of emperor Sutoku

Sutoku, as depicted by Yoshitoshi Mori (Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Sutoku has much in common with Ryōgen - he was also a historical figure who purportedly became a tengu. However, he was not a monk, but rather an emperor. He reigned from 1123 to 1142, when he was forced to abdicate in favor of his half brother Konoe.

Konoe passed away in 1155, but Sutoku was not allowed to return to the throne. It was instead claimed by another half brother, Go-Shirakawa. Sutoku decided that’s enough half brothers seizing a position he believed was still rightfully his, and plotted an uprising. This culminated in the Hōgen Disturbance of 1156. Alas, planning seemingly wasn’t his strong suit, since the conflict was essentially resolved before it even started. Go-Shirakawa’s forces defeated Sutoku’s before they even left their encampment.

Sutoku as a vengeful spirit, as depicted by Kuniyoshi Utagawa (wikimedia commons)

In the aftermath of his failed rebellion, Sutoku was exiled to Sanuki, where he eventually passed away in 1164. However, his memory lingered on. He most likely came to be widely perceived as a vengeful spirit after the great fire of Angen broke out in Kyoto in 1177. Other subsequent disasters, including the Genpei war (1180-1185) and the 1181 famine, strengthened the belief that he was punishing his enemies from behind the grave. However, he didn’t become just any vengeful ghost, but one of the three greatest members of this category ever, next to Sugawara no Michizane and Taira no Masakado. Sutoku was, in a way, the sum of many of the greatest fears of medieval Japan. The belief in his rebirth as a vengeful ghost coexisted with a tradition presenting him as a tengu - arguably one of the greatest tengu ever. This status is firmly ingrained into his image in later sources. Today he is frequently included in modern groupings of “three great youkai” alongside Shuten Dōji and Tamamo no Mae. It seems sometimes he’s replaced by Ōtakemaru, but honestly I think he is more worthy of this spot, and also even though this is ultimately a synthetic modern group, it’s much more representative of medieval culture to have a tengu alongside an oni and a fox.

A strikingly tengu-like vengeful Sutoku, as depicted by Yoshitsuya Utagawa (wikimedia commons)

While peculiar, Sutoku’s dual role as a tengu and a vengeful spirit is not entirely unique. Initially these two categories were pretty firmly separate. Tengu obstructed attaining enlightenment and rebirth in a pure land; vengeful ghosts, as their name indicates, were focused on personal vengeance. However, in popular imagination they overlapped, as evident for example in members of both groups scheming together in the Taiheiki. This most likely reflects the overlap between the perception of enemies of Buddhism and enemies of the state. Vengeful ghosts were typically members of factions who lost one political struggle or another, and their vengeance was aimed at the establishment.

Regardless of Sutoku’s supernatural taxonomic position, his post-mortem fate is tied to the fact he was a devout Buddhist. All accounts of his exile stress that he spent much of his time copying sutras. According to a rumor first attested in 1183, he also wrote a curse on their backs using his own blood, vowing to become a “demon king” - (a) Mara - due to perceived injustice he faced. There is no evidence it’s based on a historical event, even though it’s not impossible Go-Shirakawa did believe in it. At the very least, he definitely saw the deceased Sutoku as a supernatural threat, as he had various ceremonies performed in hopes of pacifying him.

Hōgen Monogatari, composed in the early fourteenth century, asserts that he became a tengu while he was still alive. When his request to deposit the completed manuscripts in a temple in Kyoto was denied by Go-Shirakawa, he vowed to remain his enemy in future lives, and stopped cutting his nails and hair. This symbolically marked his transformation. However, a former emperor couldn’t just become any tengu. Therefore, for instance in the Taiheiki he is described as a leader of the tengu, and his bird form is that of a golden kite.

Up to 2022, the Touhou wiki used to claim that “among Touhou fans, it is almost a general idea that the Tenma is inspired by Grand Emperor Sutoku” (not sure what is the “grand” doing here, there’s no such a title as daitennō as far as I am aware, but I digress), as you can see here. I will admit I’ve never encountered this headcanon - you will generally be hard pressed to find Touhou headcanons relying on actual mythology that aren’t just some variety of power level wank or otherwise all around awkward - so I think removing it was the right move (I don’t think the replacement is any better considering Mara is not a “Hindi god” - Hindi is a language, not a religion - but that’s another problem).

I’m also not aware of any Sutoku fan characters save for Tenmu Sutokuin from the fangame Mystical Power Plant who isn’t even supposed to be a take on the canon Tenma. Design-wise she clearly leans more into the vengeful spirit side of things (to the point the design would work better as Michizane than Sutoku, really, though I don’t dislike it). The filename on the wiki misspells her name as Tenma, but I have no clue whether this has anything to do with the strange headcanon assertion from the Tenma article. The closest thing to a Tenma reference she gets is a spell card referencing the sixth heaven, but the game refers to her merely as a “great tengu”.

Kōgyo Tsukioka's illustration of a performance of Matsuyama Tengu, with actors playing Saigyō, Sutoku and another tengu (wikimedia commons)

MPP aside, there's a lot of room for Sutoku in Touhou. The poet-monk Saigyō, whose life and works served as a loose inspiration for the plot of Perfect Cherry Blossom and Yuyuko’s character, went on a journey through locations associated with the late ex-emperor four years after his death, in 1168. He felt a personal connection to him because before being ordained he served as a guard of the imperial palace during his reign. This unconventional pilgrimage to at the time peripheral, sparsely inhabited areas was both a form of paying respect to his former superior, and possibly a way to pacify his vengeful spirit.

Saigyō obviously did not meet the deceased Sutoku, and ultimately only two of his poems deal with his downfall. However, later legends kept expanding upon their connection. This eventually culminated in the development of a tale according to which the monk in fact encountered Sutoku in the form of either a vengeful spirit or a tengu. The noh play Matsuyama Tengu is based on it. Its title is derived from the name Sutoku’s first residence after his exile. As a curiosity it’s worth pointing out the play singles out Sagamibō (相模坊), the tengu of Mt. Shiramine, as an ally of Sutoku - an ideal candidate for a stage 5 sidekick, if you ask me.

Some further interesting developments regarding Sutoku’s tengu identity took place in the Edo period, but I’ll discuss them in a separate section later.

The other tengu emperor: Go-Shirakawa

A portrait of Go-Shirakawa (wikimedia commons)

While Sutoku’s opposition to Go-Shirakawa essentially was the first step to the development of the belief he was a tengu, the latter also came to be viewed as a member of this category. While still alive, no less. One of the first sources to identify him as a tengu is a letter of his contemporary Minamoto no Yoritomo. He refers to the emperor as the “greatest tengu of all Japan” because of his notoriously fickle political positions. He at one point approved Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s plan to suppress Yoritomo, just to reverse this decision and declare Yoshitsune is acting on behalf of a tenma.

The notion of Go-Shirakawa being a tengu is present in the Heike Monogatari as well. In the scene I already mentioned, Sumiyoshi informs Go-Shirakawa that extensively studying Buddhist texts made him arrogant, and that he’s already attracting the attention of tengu. It is just a matter of time until he will be reborn as one of them himself. Stressing his religiosity is meant to show how it is possible for him to become a tengu in the same manner as monks.

Go-Shirakawa’s tengu career arguably peaked with his portrayal in Hirasan Kojin Reitaku. It states that both him and Sutoku became tengu, but it is the former whose “power is beyond comparison”. However, he plays no bigger role in the narrative, and he’s not described as a leader of the tengu, or even as the most powerful of them. In the absence of Ryōgen, it is apparently his contemporary Yokei (余慶; 919-991) who became the most powerful tengu. Go-Shirakawa doesn’t even get to be the second most powerful - that’s apparently Zōyo (増誉; 1032–1116). As far as I am aware, no distinct legends about these monks becoming tengu exist, so much like the elevated position of Go-Shirakawa this seems like a peculiarity of Hirasan Kojin Reitaku.

Early twentienth centiury depiction of a typical shirabyōshi costume (wikimedia commons)

While Go-Shirakawa doesn’t appear in any particularly significant pieces of tengu literature otherwise, his personal quirks are responsible for a somewhat obscure aspect of tengu background. A further detail revealed in the Hirasan Kojin Reitaku is that tengu are connoisseurs of all sorts of performances, but enjoy the dances of shirabyōshi in particular. know, I brought this up already in the previous article, but I think it’s a fun detail. Think of the sheer potential of a tengu shirabyōshi character (whether in Touhou context or elsewhere), also.

From celebrated saint to reviled tengu and back again: Ippen

A statue of Ippen from Hōgon-ji, apparently destroyed in a fire in 2013 (wikimedia commons)

Ippen is here more as a curiosity than anything, since he isn’t really a mainstay of tengu literature. Like Ryōgen and the two emperors-turned-tengu, he was a historical figure. He lived from 1238 to 1289 and founded the Jishū school of Pure Land Buddhism. He spent much of his life as a wandering preacher, advocating a unique form of nenbutsu (chanting the name of Amida), the self-explanatory nenbutsu dance (念仏踊り, nenbutsu-odori). Legends assert that various miracles occurred thanks to Ippen’s devotion. For instance, at one point the nenbutsu dance he initiated made flowers fall from the sky. On another occasion, purple clouds appeared above him. Stories of his various miraculous deeds were retold in the form of picture scrolls, such as Ippen Hijiri-e (一遍聖絵; “The Illustrated Biography of Ippen”).

Ippen’s activity, in particular the dance he promoted, was evidently controversial among his contemporaries. Tengu Zōshi refers to him as the “chief tengu”, and portrays the practices he spread negatively. An entire explanatory paragraph is devoted to stressing the disruptive character of nenbutsu he promoted. Alongside other unorthodox behaviors it is blamed for various social ills including the fall of the Song dynasty in China (sic).

The opposition of other Buddhist schools to certain early currents within the Pure Land movement was often rooted in the rejection of the worship of deities and even Buddhas other than Amida. Of course, today it’s not hard to find people incorrectly convinced Buddhism is a “religion without gods” (this is a phenomenon so widespread it was actually considered a major obstacle by researchers of the history of Buddhism). However, through the middle ages devas, kami, Onmyōdō calendar deities and various figures like Dakiniten or Matarajin who defy classification altogether were anything but marginal in most schools of Buddhism in Japan. Oaths were sworn by Taishakuten and his entourage, Enmaten and Taizan Fukun were invoked in popular rites meant to guarantee good fortune, and so on. Interestingly, Tengu Zōshi does not deny that miracles attributed to Ippen really happened. In fact, they are even depicted in the illustrations. However, the reader is expected to realize they are implicitly not a genuine display of Buddhist holiness, but merely a tengu trick meant to lead people astray. This is essentially a twist on stories already common in the Heian period, something like the tengu pretending to be a Buddha in a famous story from the Konjaku Monogatari adapted to reflect the anxieties of the Kamakura period tied to new religious movements.

The condemnation of Ippen goes further than merely implying his miracles were trickery, though. While in the final section of the scroll it is revealed that with enough effort even a tengu can attain buddhahood, Ippen is singled out as incapable of that. He is destined to fall even further from grace and to be reborn in the realm of beasts. Despite the circulation of such negative opinions about Ippen among his contemporaries, Jishū school ultimately survived past the Kamakura period, and it still exists today.

Tengu caught between history and fiction: Tarōbō

Tarōbō in a mandala from Mt. Atago (via Patricia Yamada's Bodhisattva as Warrior God; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Tarōbō (太郎坊) is the tengu of Mount Atago. This location’s association with the tengu is well attested, and for instance in Hirasan Kojin Reitaku multiple of them are said to reside there, including Yokei, Zōyo and Jien.

However, Tarōbō is not identical with any of these historical monks. He’s an interesting case because it would appear he stands exactly on the border between historical figures and literary characters. One of the first attestations of him, if not the first one outright, has been identified in the Tengu Zōshi. On an illustration showing a gathering of tengu leaders, who are mostly identified by the names of schools of Buddhism they represent, one is instead given a specific name, Atago Tarōbō (愛石護太郎房). His notoriety continued to grow in later sources: Taiheiki presents him as a well known tengu, while Heike Monogatari outright labels him the “greatest tengu in all of Japan”. While Tengu Zōshi and other early sources don’t provide any information about Tarōbō’s origin, in later tradition he came to be identified with the legendary Korean monk Nichira (日羅). His name would be read as Illa following the Hanja sign values, and at least some authors prefer using this reading or list both. I’m sticking to Nichira here, to maintain consistency with a name sometimes used to refer to his tengu form, Nichirabō (日羅坊; “the monk Nichira”).

A statue of Nichira (amagasaki-daikakuji.com; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Nichira is mentioned for the first time in the Nihon Shoki, in the section dedicated to the reign of emperor Bidatsu (late sixth century). He is described as an inhabitant of Baekje, one of the three Korean kingdoms which existed at the time. However, his father came there from Japan. The emperor seeks his help with navigating foreign policy. After some tribulations - apparently the king of Baekje didn’t want to let him go - he finally arrived in Japan in 583, armed and on horseback. He starts acting as an advisor to the emperor.

After a few months, Nichira is assassinated by other Baekje envoys present in the court since he wants the emperor to pursue rather aggressive foreign policy (most notably, he suggests ruthlessly slaughtering any potential settlers from Baekje who would try to establish settlements in Japan). The assassination has to be delayed, because he emits supernatural light at night. That’s not where his apparent supernatural powers end - after being killed he resurrects for a moment in order to make it clear his assassination was not a plot of Silla (another Korean kingdom). He is later buried, and no further mention is made of him.

While some elements of the Nihon Shoki account were retained in later legends about Nichira, especially his arrival from Korea and his ability to emit a supernatural glow, he was otherwise essentially entirely reinvented. Instead of an advisor of emperor Bidatsu, he came to be portrayed as a Buddhist monk and as an ally of prince Shotoku.

An early example of such a legend is preserved in Nihon Ōjō Gokuraku-ki (日本往生極楽記; “Japanese records of rebirth in a Pure Land”) from the late tenth century. It states that Nichira met with Shotoku when the latter was still a child, and declared he was a manifestation of Kannon. The prince in response recognized him as the reincarnation of one of his disciples from an unspecified past life. We also learn that he is capable of emitting light because of his devotion to Surya, the personification of the sun. There’s no real chronological issue here: while Nihon Shoki doesn’t mention Shotoku (or Buddhism, for that matter; it first comes up a year after Nichira’s death there) in any passages dealing with Nichira, the prince would indeed be a kid at the time of his arrival.

Things get more complicated later on. True to his portrayal as a ruthless enthusiast of military operations, Nichira came to be described as aiding Shotoku in quelling Mononobe no Moriya and his allies. Following the conventional chronology this would have happened long after Nichira’s death, though. A possible attempt at reconciling obviously contradictory traditions can be found in Ōe no Masafusa’s Honchō Shinsenden (本朝神仙伝), as you might remember from the Ten Desires post from last year. In contrast with virtually every other source dealing with Shotoku’s genealogy, Masafusa claims the prince was a son of Bidatsu, which would make him considerably older at the time of Nichira’s arrival. The meeting between them is fairly similar to the Nihon Ōjō Gokuraku-ki version: Nichira recognizes Shotoku as a manifestation of Kannon, and both of them then emit supernatural light. No mention is made of any military help, though. The portrayal of Nichira as a military ally of Shotoku is present in legends which link him with tengu. After the defeat of Moriya, he supposedly left to take over Mt. Atago. According to a guide to famous places (名所記, meishoki) from 1686, Kyōwarabe (京童; “Children in Kyoto”) by Kiun Nakagawa (中川喜雲; 1636-1705) he did so in the form of a tengu.

Atago Gongen (wikimedia commons)

Bernard Faure notes there is a similar legend in which Nichira is a separate figure from Tarōbō. The former, portrayed as a military official in the service of prince Shotoku, sets on a journey to pacify the tengu of Mt. Atago. He accomplishes this by revealing he is a manifestation of Shōgun Jizō (勝軍地蔵), a Kamakura period reinterpretation of this normally peaceful bodhisattva as a fearsome warrior, historically worshiped on Mt. Atago as Atago Gongen. Nichira then becomes the leader of the tengu, while Tarōbō provides him with information about the mountain.

Something that surprised me is that there is a single Korean source which mentions the tradition presenting Nichira as a monk who became a tengu. During the Imjin war, a failed Japanese invasion of Korea, the Korean Neo-Confucian philosopher Kang Hang was captured and subsequently spent three years (from 1597 to 1600) in Japan as a prisoner of war before escaping (possibly with the help of Seika Fujiwara, a fellow Neo-Confucian scholar he befriended). He wrote a memoir dealing with this experience, Kanyangnok (“The record of a shepherd”) in which he mentions Nichira in passing. He states that he was known as Tarōbō, and that he was enshrined and worshiped as Atago Gongen.

Something that’s worth pointing out is that despite living centuries apart, Ōe no Masafusa and Kang Hang both make the same mistake, stating that Illa arrived in Japan from Silla, as opposed to Baekje. I thought this might represent an alternative tradition, but in both cases translators pretty firmly conclude we’re dealing with a mistake. My best bet would be that this has something to do with the Japanese name of Silla, 新羅, sharing a kanji with Nichira’s own name; the name of Baekje, 百済, does not. It doesn’t seem any later legend brings up his post-mortem effort to clear the name of Silla envoys from the Nihon Shoki, so I don’t think that was necessarily a factor.

I’m actually shocked I haven’t seen a Touhou take on Nichira, considering his association with Shotoku. In particular, it’s worth pointing out that his transformation into a tengu is essentially how people tend to mistakenly assume the connection between Matarajin and Hata no Kawakatsu works (in reality, it’s very limited in scope and indirect, but that’s a topic for another time). Plus there’s a lot of storytelling potential in having a tengu - or even Tenma - be yet another character from Miko’s past. ZUN isn’t very interested in building upon prince Shotoku legends involving Kawakatsu or Kurokoma, but it’s hard to deny they’re a popular topic in fanart.

Yet another tradition about the identity of Tarobō, as far as I can tell entirely independent from his connection to Nichira, is preserved in the Engyōbon, the oldest version of Heike Monogatari. A gloss states that he is the tengu form of the monk Shinzei (真済; 800-860), who in a tale from Konjaku Monogatari and a variety of other sources menaced empress Somedono (染殿后; Fujiwara no Akirakeiko), the wife of emperor Seiwa.

Tarōbō also plays a role in a tale unrelated to speculation about his origin, Kuruma-zō Sōshi (車僧草紙; “Tale of the handcart priest”). It was originally composed in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The eponymous protagonist is a Zen practitioner who, as his name indicates, travels with his handcart in tow. Tarōbō attempts to convince him to abandon this lifestyle. They engage in a Zen dialogue (mondō), in which the monk triumphs over the tengu. He also manages to overcome Tarōbō’s subordinates who attempt to make him stray away from his practice by showing him gruesome images of battles in the realm of the asuras.

Finally, under the name Nichirabō Tarōbō appears in the tale of Zegaibō. Initially I planned to only dedicate a single paragraph to it, but I figured Zegaibō is such a fun figure that a separate section is warranted.

Not a tiangou: Zegaibō, the Chinese tengu

Zegaibō taking a bath (wikimedia commons)

The history of Zegaibō (是害坊) starts before he even got this name. In the anthology Konjaku Monogatari, there are a handful of stories about tengu arriving in Japan from overseas - specifically from India or China. These are obviously literary fiction, as there is nothing quite analogous to tengu in Indian literature, and while their name is borrowed from Chinese tiangou, this term also doesn’t have all that much to do with tengu, ultimately.

One of the aforementioned stories focuses on a Chinese tengu named Chira Yōju (智羅永寿; I was unable to establish whether there’s any connection with 智羅天狐, the alternate name of Iizuna Gongen, Chira Tenko) He arrives in Japan to challenge local Buddhist monks. He reveals that he has previously bested these in his homeland successfully, and that he would like to check how their Japanese peers compare. Local tengu take him to Mt. Hiei, where he unsuccessfully tries to bait major Tendai monks, including Ryōgen, into battling him. He is eventually beaten up by Ryōgen’s attendants, and after his defeat the Japanese tengu take him to a hot spring so that he can recover. In the end he decides to return home. It was possible to establish that Chira Yōju was the basis for the tale of Zegaibō because the colophon of an illustrated scroll known simply as Zegaibō Emaki (是害坊絵巻) states that the story draws inspiration from a similar tale from the lost collection Uji Dainagon Monogatari. Based on other sources it is assumed it was most likely identical with the Konjaku Monogatari account of the misadventures of Chira Yōju. Save for the change of the main character’s name, the stories do not differ much. More time is dedicated to the meeting between Zegaibō and the Japanese tengu, though. They are led by Nichirabō from Mt. Atago.

Zegaibō meeting with his Japanese peers (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Zegaibō evidently became a popular, recognizable character later on. This might reflect a sense of patriotism (or nationalism) the story possibly could have inspired in the readers: the Japanese monks are portrayed as more resistant to the schemes of demons than their continental peers, after all. However, it’s also possible that Zegaibō’s defeat was interpreted as a take on tensions between Buddhist monks and shugenja, considering the latter were commonly compared with tengu. Regardless of which interpretation is correct, Zegaibō’s undeniable popularity allowed him to reappear in a variety of other tales. There is a noh play which simply adapts the tale about him, Zegai. The events are largely the same, though the name Tarōbō is used instead of Nichirabō to refer to the tengu of Mt. Atago. Bernard Faure mentions that in one version of the legend about Nichira’s arrival on Mt. Atago, he defeats Zegaibō, here portrayed as the leader of the local tengu. The tengu subsequently reveals the “sacred geography” of Japan to him. Finally, Zegaibō plays a major role in the Edo period puppet play Shuten Dōji Wakazakari (酒呑童子若壮; “Shuten Dōji in the Prime of Youth”).

In this work, Zegaibō is indirectly responsible for the transformation of the eponymous character into an oni. After a rampage which left 160 monks dead and various other heinous acts, the young Shuten Dōji, known simply as Akudōmaru (悪童丸; “evil child”), proclaims that there has never been anyone more mighty than him in Japan, China or India. This display of arrogance alerts Zegaibō, who appears in the guise of a young monk and offers to wrestle with him so that he can prove his strength. However, as soon as the fight starts, he reveals his true form and takes Shuten Dōji into the air.

Zegaibō presents Akudōmaru to Maheśvara (via Keller Kimbrough's Battling Tengu, Battling Conceit; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Zegaibō then brings his opponent to Maheśvara (摩醯首羅王, Makeishuraō; a phonetic transcription is used in place of the most common Japanese form 大自在天, Daijizaiten). The latter is unexpectedly described as a maō. Zegaibō seemingly presumes that his boss will punish the unruly human by turning him into a tengu, but Maheśvara is so impressed by his bravery that he chooses to turn him into an oni to let him cause even more chaos. This is rather obviously distinct from the more widespread versions I discussed in the not so distant past.

From makara to tengu: Konpira

A typical depiction of Konpira as one of the heavenly generals (via Bernard Faure’s Rage and Ravage; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

While Zegaibō according to tales focused on him arrived from China, there is technically a tengu whose origins were believed to lie even further away - Konpira (金比羅). However, he is a special case because despite being arguably one of the most famous tengu, he actually wasn’t viewed as a member of this category for most of his history.

Konpira is a Japanese transliteration of Sanskrit Kumbhīra. This name can be literally translated as “crocodile”. His origin is poorly understood, though it is possible he was originally essentially a divine representation of reptilian inhabitants of the Ganges. As you can read here, the gharial, the mugger crocodile and the saltwater crocodile all can be found in this river in some capacity.

Fittingly, Kumbhīra is sometimes described as a makara who converted to Buddhism. This term refers to a type of partially crocodilian mythical hybrid, most notably depicted as the steed of Hindu deities such as Ganga and Varuna. Bernard Faure suggests that in Japan he might have been analogously understood as a wani at first. However, Kumbhīra could also be portrayed as a yaksha, for example in the Golden Light Sutra. What remained consistent is the idea that he was a fierce being converted to Buddhism.

Kumbhīra is well known as the foremost of the Twelve Heavenly Generals (十二神将, jūni shinshō). It is possible that the crocodilian Kumbhīra and the homonymous heavenly general were initially separate deities, though in Japanese context they are effectively the same. Konpira and his peers are regarded as the protectors of the Buddha Yakushi but historically were simultaneously perceived as a type of shikigami. I will only discuss this role more in my next article, though, as it is not very relevant here. All you need to know is that it made him a commonly invoked protective deity in apotropaic rituals.

An interesting legend pertaining to this aspect of Konpira’s character is preserved in the Taiheiki. When Fujiwara no Yasutada (藤原保忠; 890-936) fell ill, a Buddhist priest arrived to perform a ritual focused on Yakushi and his heavenly generals to heal him. However, as soon as he started to invoke Konpira, Yasutada got so horrified that he died. The ritual has apparently been hijacked through supernatural means, and what he heard was not the name “Konpira” but rather the phrase kubi kiran - “I’ll cut off your head”. This was an act of vengeance of the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane - Yasutada was one of the courtiers who conspired to exile him earlier. Evidently after he became a vengeful spirit he was able to essentially turn Konpira to his cause and reverse the effects of invoking him.

While the heavenly generals are associated with the Chinese zodiac, the correspondences between the individual deities and zodiacal animals aren’t really consistent. Konpira can variously be linked with the tiger, the rat or the boar, and accordingly with the northeast, north or northwest. The northeastern link is particularly significant, as in some cases it led to conflation between him and Matarajin, who as a subduer of demons was strongly associated with this direction.

A variant of the legend in which Saichō, the founder of Tendai, meets Matarajin during his journey to China identifies the latter with Konpira. Supposedly Konpira slash Matarajin was originally the protector of the Vulture Peak in India, then moved to Mount Tiantai in China, and finally reached Mount Hiei in Japan with Saichō. The two were also equated with each other by the Tendai priest Jōin (乗因; 1682–1739) in the Edo period. However, his attempt was actually met with criticism from his contemporaries. A certain Sōji Mitsuan (密庵僧慈) wrote in 1806 that Jōin was evidently confused because Matarajin and Konpira are clearly separate deities. He concludes he evidently didn’t even read the Mahāvairocana Sutra. I’m honestly surprised ZUN didn’t reference this conflict over syncretism in any of Okina’s spell cards, it would fit right in.

Konpira Daigongen (wikimedia commons)

Despite Matarajin’s tengu credentials, which I discussed last month, the association between him and Konpira actually isn’t why the latter came to be seen as a tengu. This phenomenon instead began as an aspect of his role as the protective deity of Matsuo-ji on Mt. Zōzu (象頭山) in Shikoku. Here he came to be worshiped under the name Konpira Daigongen (金毘羅大権現). His enshrinement apparently only occurred in 1573, though according to a legend from the seventeenth century he arrived there much earlier, and already resided on Mt. Zōzu in the times of En no Gyōja. However, there is no reference to him in the few earlier sources dealing with this location. Since its name can be translated as “Mt. Elephant Head”, it has been suggested that it might have been associated with Shōten, the Japanese form of Ganesha, in earlier periods, though this remains speculative.

Despite Konpira’s new role as a mountain god, his early aquatic connections were not entirely lost. In the eighteenth century he came to be seen as a protector of maritime routes through the Seto Inland Sea and tutelary god of navigation. This reflected the growth of importance of inland maritime trade which was a result of the shogunate's ban on most foreign trade. Interestingly, while most donations were made to Konpira by local sailors and merchants, his new role made him so famous that Chinese traders residing in Nagasaki prayed to him too, and a small shrine was even erected in that city at one point. Donations made by travelers from the Ryukyu Kingdom are recorded too. Both of these phenomena were highlighted in Edo travel books in order to stress the prestige of Konpira.

Kongōbō (Universität Wien's Religion in Japan: Ein digitales Handbuch)

Konpira didn’t become a tengu right away. The oldest recorded tradition associating Mt. Zōzu with a specific tengu refers to him as Kongōbō (金剛坊; “diamond priest”). He was not (yet) a form of Konpira, but rather a deified seventeenth century Shingon monk, Yūsei (宥盛), who between 1600 and 1613 served as the abbot of Matsuo-ji. It seems Yūsei actually created the image of himself as a tengu on his own - in 1606 he commissioned a statue depicting him as a tengu manifestation of Fudo Myōō. The inscription explicitly states that he “entered the way of tengu” in order to bring fame to the mountain. This was a part of a bigger project of portraying himself as a master of various esoteric arts in order to gain the patronage of local nobles. After he passed away, his disciples and relatives continued spreading the image of his tengu form, now renamed Kongōbō. He eventually came to be seen as a manifestation of Konpira.

In popular imagination the new tengu-like image of Konpira eventually came to be detached from its actual origin. He was instead identified as emperor Sutoku simply because both were associated with roughly the same area - the historical Sanuki province. This idea was popularized by the 1756 play Konpira Gohonji Sutokuin Sanuki Denki (“The Sanuki Legend of the Retired Emperor Sutoku, the Original Source of Konpira”) by Izumo Takeda II. Various other authors followed in his footsteps, including Akinari Ueda and Bakin Takazawa, strengthening this equation.

While I focused on the early portrayal of Konpira and on his eventual transformations into a tengu, the traditions of Mt. Zōzu continued to evolve in subsequent centuries. After the separation of Buddhism and Shinto, Konpira came to be viewed as a kami. Due to the influence of Atsutane Hirata and his disciples he received a new name, Kotohira (金刀比羅) after the Meiji reforms. However, many lay people continued to refer to the protector of the mountain as Konpira. Today both forms of the name are in use.

Bibliography Tumblr doesn't let me post the bibliography as a part of the article for some reason. You can find it here in the form of a google doc.

#touhou #touhou project #tenma #tengu

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